Two-and-a-half miles from this point, across country and in the angle formed by the branching of the Watling Street and the Holyhead Road from Weedon, lie the village and the romantic manor-house of Ashby St. Ledgers, the home of Robert Catesby, chief conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot. From Braunston is by no means the best way to Ashby: reached by a long, steep lane, and across six fields and two cross-roads. The only guides on this solitary way are the traveller’s bump of location and a battered sign-post in a cross-road, on one of whose decrepit arms, pointing vaguely through an impenetrable hedge into a ploughed field, the words, “To Ashby St. Ledgers and Crick Station,” can, under favouring circumstances of sunshine, be faintly spelled. A meditative rook, perching on a deserted harrow, typical of solitude, seemed, when the present historian came this way, to hold and keep the secret of the route, only discovered by diligent scouting at the next field-gate. But Ashby St. Ledgers is worth this effort. At the end of the rather uninteresting village, and closing the view, there suddenly comes the beautiful grouping of old church, gatehouse, and ancient trees, leading to the manor-house itself, glimpsed through the gate—a fine old Elizabethan house, a picturesque pile of terraces, oriel windows and gables, weather-stained and delightfully picturing the orthodox character of a conspirator’s home. [Illustration: ASHBY ST. LEDGERS.] They still show the “Gunpowder Plot Room” over the gateway, and the memorials of Catesby’s ancestors can even now be seen in the church—that Church of St. Leodegarius from whom the place derives its name. There they lie on the floor; monumental brasses of Catesbys, with their cognizance, a black lion, conspicuous where the fury of centuries ago has not hacked the workmanship out of recognition. There lie Sir William Catesby, 1470, and his son, Sir William, taken prisoner at Bosworth Field fifteen years later, _ex parte_ Richard III., and beheaded at Leicester; great-great-great-grandfather of the conspirator, Robert, and a warning, had he lent an ear to the history of his family, against too rashly entering into the bloody politics of those times. That remote ancestor’s fate carried with it the forfeiture of his estates, soon restored to his son; but when Robert Catesby fell in his attempt to destroy King and Parliament, and to subvert the Protestant religion, the property, forfeited again, was never restored. XXXVII