There is a postscript, again, which seems written as a suggestion for what Digby should say. "I hope you will also witness with me that you have ever seen me much averted from such violent courses, and hopeful rather of help by favour than force. And, indeed, if I had not now been satisfied by your assurance that there was nothing in hand, it should presently have appeared how much I had misliked any forcible attempts, the counsel of Christ and the commandment of our superiors requiring the contrary, and that in patience we should possess our souls." To give him his due, Sir Everard Digby spoke boldly in Father Gerard's favour at his trial. Five-and-twenty years later, Father Gerard wrote, in a letter to Dr Smith, Bishop of Chalcedon,[376] "Sir Everard Digby, who of all the others, for many reasons, was most suspected of having possibly revealed the secret to me, protested in open Court and declared that he had often been instigated to say I knew something of the Plot, but that he had always answered in the negative, alleging the reason why he had never disclosed it to me, because, he said, he feared lest I should dissuade him from it. Therefore the greater part of the Privy Councillors considered my innocence established, &c." [376] _Life of Father J. Gerard_, p. ccxxxviii. Six months later, Father Fitzherbert, Rector of the English College of Rome, wrote concerning Father Gerard to the same bishop[377] "he was fully cleared of it" [the Gunpowder Plot] "by the public and solemn testimony of the delinquents themselves, namely, of Sir Everard Digby (with whom he was known to be most familiar and confident), who publicly protested at his arraignment that he did never acquaint him with their design, being assured that he would not like of it, but dissuade him from it; and of this I can show good testimony by letters from London written hither at the time." [377] Bartoli's _Inghilterra_, pp. 510, 512. Probably owing, in the main, to Sir Everard's declarations of his innocence, Father Gerard was allowed to escape from England, and he survived the Gunpowder Plot thirty-one years. It must not be supposed, however, that he had never suffered for the faith in this country; for he had been terribly tortured, some years before the Gunpowder Plot, in the Tower, from which he escaped.