Then she asked the same question concerning several other Catholics living in the county, or the adjoining counties--among others, a lady who lived about ten miles from Gothurst. "Why," said Lee, "she not only knows him as a priest, but has given herself, and all her household, and all that she has, to be directed by him, and takes no other guide but him." At this, she admitted that she was thoroughly satisfied. Whereupon Lee remarked of his friend-- "You will find him, however, quite a different man when he has put off his present character." "This," wrote the priest himself, who was Father John Gerard, second son of[37] Sir Thomas Gerard,[38] a Lancashire Knight, and an ancestor of the present Lord Gerard. "This she acknowledged the next day, when she saw me in my soutane and other priestly garments, such as she had never before seen. She made a most careful confession, and came to have so great an opinion of my poor powers, that she gave herself entirely to my direction, meditated great things, which, indeed, she carried out, and carries out still." [37] This Sir T. Gerard was committed to the Tower on an accusation "of a design to deliver Mary Queen of Scots out of her confinement."--_Burke's Peerage_, 1886, p. 576. [38] _Life of Gerard_, p. clii. I can fancy certain people, on reading all this, saying, "How very underhand!" I would ask them to bear in mind that for Father Gerard to have acted otherwise, and to have gone about in "priestly garments," under his own name, would have been the same thing as to have gone to the common hangman and to have asked him to be so obliging as to put the noose round his neck, and then to cut him down as quickly as possible in order that he might relish to the full the ghastly operation of disembowelling and quartering. To this it may be replied that to conceal his identity might be all very well, but that it was quite another thing to stay at the house of a friend under that concealment, and, in the character of a layman and a guest, to decoy his host's wife from her husband's religion, in that host's and husband's absence, thus betraying his friendship and violating his hospitality.