The Identification of the Writer of the Anonymous Letter to Lord Monteagle in 1605Monteagle, William Parker, Baron
History
The Identification of the Writer of the Anonymous Letter to Lord Monteagle in 1605
Monteagle, William Parker, Baron
Gunpowder Plot, 1605; Monteagle, William Parker, Baron, 1574 or 1575-1622
[Footnote 22: When Garnet returned from Rome in 1585, as Superior of the
Jesuits in England, he made the Treshams' acquaintance, being a
prominent Roman Catholic family, when Francis was eighteen. Garnet was
not their confessor, and the acquaintance had dropped for at least
sixteen years before the Spanish Treason in 1602. Garnet's statement,
made (March 23, 1605-6) after Tresham's death, is: "I knew him about 18
years ago, but since discontinued my acquaintance until the time between
his trouble in my lord of Essex's tumult and the Queen's death"
(1602-3). Garnet would have neither motive nor inclination to shield
Tresham, whose betrayal of the plot had brought Garnet to the Tower. He
might otherwise have discerned Tresham's real meaning in his statement
of "sixteen years before," which the contemporary Jesuit Father Gerard
correctly interprets as before 1602 in his narrative of the plot. It was
not Garnet's complicity in the Spanish Treason in the previous reign
(for which he had his pardon) that the Government cared about, and that
so shook Salisbury, but simply Tresham's dying statement being
misunderstood to mean that he had not seen Garnet for the past sixteen
years, which is all that the present writer is concerned with.]
[Footnote 23: "State Papers, Domestic," James I., xvi. 62.]
[Footnote 24: So he said at the trial: "She came to see me, but I spared
either to speak with her or hear her." But Mrs. Tresham in her
examination said that, "in respect of her sorrow and heaviness," she
"was enforced to send it"; and in her note enclosing the dying statement
to Sir Walter Cope for delivery, she wrote: "My sorrows are such that I
am altogether unfit to come abroad; wherefore I would entreat you to
deliver it yourself unto my lord, that I may have my husband's desire
fulfilled therein" ("State Papers, Domestic," James I., ccxvi. 211).]
[Footnote 25: Examination of Mrs. Tresham (_ibid._, ccxvi. 209).]
[Footnote 26: Examination of William Vavasour (_ibid._, ccxvi. 207).]
[Footnote 27: Vavasour, in his authentic and ordinary writing, used
flat-topped "g's," as seen in the anonymous letter, as well as in No. 2,
ascribed to him.]
[Footnote 28: The deed of Robert Catesby's marriage settlement with
Katherine, eldest daughter of Sir Thomas Leigh, of Stoneleigh (1592), in
the possession of T.W. Whitmore-Jones; Esq., of Chastleton House, Oxon,
is in a similar legal hand, with precisely the same peculiarities of
"s," "g," "w," "h," etc. A law-writer's hand to-day is in a
"copper-plate" style, which, although most suitable for the purpose, is
not the kind of hand that an educated person would write whose business
was not copying, and there was then a similar distinction between them.]
[Footnote 29: Apparently owing to restrictions of space and paper.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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