Lastly, he must be allowed to have his share in the fair and considerate pleadings of the greatest of all historians of the Stuart period, on behalf of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot. Dr Samuel Rawson Gardiner writes:--[412] "Atrocious as the whole undertaking was, great as must have been the moral obliquity of their minds before they could have conceived such a project, there was at least nothing mean or selfish about them. They had boldly risked their lives for what they honestly believed to be the cause of God and of their country." A few lines further on he says, "if the criminality of their design was hidden from the eyes of the plotters, it was not from any ambitious thoughts of the consequences of success to themselves." Presently he adds, "As far as we can judge, they would have been ready, as soon as the wrongs of which they complained had been redressed, to sink back again into obscurity." And finally, after dwelling upon their difficulty in seeing "their atrocious crime in the light in which we see it," he declares his opinion that, just at last, at least some of them saw "their acts as they really were," and "with such thoughts as these on their minds," "passed away from the world which they had wronged to the presence of Him who had seen their guilt and their repentance alike." [412] History of England, Vol. i. pp. 263-4. It is well, however, to be just as well as generous, and if it be impossible to consider the fine, handsome youth, of four and twenty, awaiting execution in the Tower of London, without feelings of compassion; we should none the less remember that Sir Everard Digby's co-religionists have other reasons for sorrow in connection with him. Instead of benefiting the Catholic cause in his country by the enterprise which he assisted with his influence, his wealth, his time, and his personal services, he did it the most serious mischief conceivable; we must keep before our minds, therefore, the fact, that to Catholics he should appear, not so much an unhappy failure, as a most active, if most unintentional, aggressor. Although King James himself declared that the English Catholics, as a body, were neither implicated in, nor approvers of the Gunpowder Plot; although the Archpriest condemned it formally a day or two after its discovery; although Father Gerard and other Jesuits distinctly and categorically disclaimed all connection with it, and although the Pope himself addressed two letters to King James, expressing his unqualified horror of it, the idea was never dispelled that it was a Popish and Jesuitical design. For many years, English people were ready to believe any absurd tale of Catholic conspiracy, such as[413] "Rome's Master-piece: or, The Grand Conspiracy of the Pope and his Jesuited Instruments," in 1640, and the pretended plot to assassinate Charles II. in 1678, for which, on the perjured evidence of Titus Oates and others,[414] "about eighteen Roman