As to Sir Everard's friendship with Catesby, he said, it was "mere folly, and wicked Conspiracy"; his religion was "Error and Heresie"; his promises--it does not appear that he had made any--were "idle and vain presumptions"; "as also his fears, false alarms, Concerning Wives that were Recusants." "If a man married one," great reason there is, "that he or they should pay for it"; but if a wife "were no Recusant at the time of Marriage"--as had been the case with Lady Digby, although he did not mention her by name--"and yet afterwards he suffer her to be corrupted and seduced, by admitting Priests and Romanists into his house"--Roger Lee and Father Gerard, for instance, Sir Everard might understand him to imply--"good reason that he, be he Papist or Protestant, should pay for his negligence and misgovernment." Next he dealt with Sir Everard's petitions on behalf of his wife, children, sisters, &c., and on this point he became eloquent.[397] "Oh how he doth now put on the bowels of Nature and Compassion in the perils of his private and domesticated estate! But before, when the publick state of his Countrey, when the King, the Queen, the tender Princes, the Nobles, the whole Kingdom, were designed to a perpetual destruction, Where was then this piety, this Religious affection?" "All Nature, all Humanity, all respect of Laws both Divine and Humane, were quite abandoned; then there was no conscience made to extirpate the whole Nation, and all for a pretended zeal to the Catholick Religion, and the justification of so detestable and damnable a Fact." [397] _Gunpowder Treason_, by Thomas, Bp. of Lincoln, p. (57). Here Sir Everard Digby interrupted the great lawyer with the remark that he had not justified the fact, but had confessed that he deserved the vilest death; and that all he had done was to seek mercy, "and some moderation of justice."