About the end of August, or perhaps early in September, 1605, a large party met at Gothurst, as guests of Sir Everard and Lady Digby, but with an ulterior purpose. To pray for the much-oppressed cause of the Catholic religion in England, for their suffering fellow-religionists, and for themselves, they had agreed to make a pilgrimage together to the famous shrine of St Winefride at Holywell, in Flintshire,[125] which would entail a journey of a hundred and fifty miles.[126] Sir Everard does not appear to have accompanied it; but, among those assembled at Gothurst who were to go on the pilgrimage were his young wife, Miss Anne Vaux, Brooksby and his wife, Thomas Digby, Sir Everard's brother, who had evidently followed his example and become a Catholic, Sir Francis Lacon and his daughter, Father Garnet, the Provincial of the Jesuits, a lay-brother named Nicholas Owen, who usually accompanied him, and Father Strange, Sir Everard's chaplain, making, with their servants and others, a party of pilgrims numbering little short of thirty. Later on, Father Darcy and Father Fisher also joined them.[127] [125] _Father H. Garnet and the Gunpowder Plot_, by J. H. Pollen, S. J., p. 15. [126] A party, including ladies, would not be likely to travel faster than thirty miles a day over the bad roads, therefore it would take more than four times as long to go, then, from Gothurst to Holywell, as it would now take to go from Gothurst to the famous shrine at Lourdes, in the Pyrenees. [127] Cal. Sta. Pa. Dom., 1603-10, p. 270. If, as it seems, Sir Everard did not go with the pilgrimage, the reason may have been that he was engaged in endeavouring to negotiate the proposed marriage between young Lord Vaux and a daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, although it seemed early to do so, as the boy was then only about fourteen. "Riding westward,[128] the party of pilgrims would stop for the night at some Catholic friend's house, and in the morning the two priests would say Mass. Even at Shrewsbury, when they had to put up at an inn, and at 'a castle in a holt at Denbighshire,' the daily Masses were said without interruption, and even the servants were present. At St Winefride's Well, too, though the inn must have been small for so large a number, the Holy Sacrifice was again offered, and then the ladies went barefoot to the Well.[129] At Holywell they stopped but one night. Returning next day, they slept at a farmhouse seven miles from Shrewsbury, and after that they were again in the circle of their friends."[130] [128] _Father Garnet and the Gunpowder Plot_, Pollen, p. 18. [129] Jardine, in his _Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot_ (p. 180), says that the ladies walked barefoot from Holt, that is to say, a distance of about twenty miles. [130] _Father Garnet and the Gunpowder Plot_, pp. 18, 19.