It was the opinion of the other conspirators, as well as of the Jesuit priests who became involved in the plot through the confessional, that the warning letter originated with Francis Tresham, whose sister was Lady Monteagle, and another sister had married Lord Stourton; and Tresham had been most earnest with Catesby that those two lords, particularly Monteagle, should be warned. In each instance, Catesby was careful to impose the oath and engage the faith of the conspirator, before disclosing the plot; and Tresham, the thirteenth and last, sworn conspirator, on hearing the particulars, entirely disapproved of the conspiracy, from which he tried to dissuade Catesby, offering him the use of his own purse if he would even defer it.[8] Tresham could indeed have desired nothing less than to become involved in such a matter. His father had recently died, and he had succeeded to a considerable property,[9] which alone induced his first cousin Catesby to bring him into the plot. As Tresham wrote when in the Tower:[10] "I thank God I am owner of such a fortune as is able to afford me what I desire, the comfort whereof is so much the sweeter unto me, as I have spent most of my time overburthened with debts and wants, and had resolved within myself to spend my days quietly."[11] He acknowledged that his intentions with regard to the other conspirators were "to ship them away that they might have no means left them to contrive any more ... then to have taken a course to have given the State advertisement by some unknown means."[11] He was consequently the only conspirator who remained behind and at large after Fawkes was taken and the others had fled. There can be no reasonable doubt that Tresham, though not the writer, was the sender of the letter; and upon this hypothesis all investigators must go, as there is none other at all likely. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 2: Salisbury, in his letter to Sir Charles Cornwallis, Ambassador at Madrid (November 9), gives the hour as six o'clock.] [Footnote 3: This was his secretary, Thomas Ward, who was known to Monteagle as a friend of some of the conspirators (as Monteagle himself was), and one of whom, Ward, the next morning told of the receipt of the letter. "As a plan concocted by Monteagle and Tresham to stop the plot, and at the same time to secure the escape of their guilty friends, the little comedy at Hoxton was admirably concocted" ("What Gunpowder Plot was," by S.R. Gardiner, D.C.L., 1897, p. 124).] [Footnote 4: Father John Gerard (1564-1637) gives particulars of the delivery of the letter at Hoxton in his contemporary "Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot," published in 1872.] [Footnote 5: "Calendar of Tresham Papers," p. 132.] [Footnote 6: The word "yowe" (you), here cancelled in the original, indicates the writer's first thoughts, and, no doubt, his real meaning.]