Although Sir Everard Digby had been led by Catesby to believe that some of the Jesuit Fathers had given their approval to the Gunpowder Plot, and had special reasons, as we have seen, for imagining Father Garnet to be one of these, he does not appear to have thought that Father Gerard knew anything about the matter, or would have consented to it if he had known of it: for, on his arraignment, he declared that Father Gerard was ignorant of it, and that he had never mentioned it to him,[225] "alleging the reason," "because, he said, he feared lest" that Father "should dissuade him from it." So here we find him acting in opposition to his greatest friend--his "brother," as he called him--the priest who had received him into the Church, and was his chief spiritual adviser. A good Catholic might lawfully act in opposition to the opinion of his confessor or director in matters open to difference of view, especially when that opinion was only suspected, and had not been delivered; but on such an all-important question as this, he might have been expected to consult Gerard, although it must be remembered that he had been assured by Catesby that another Jesuit had approved of the plot. [225] Father Gerard's letter to the Bishop of Chalcedon. See _Life of Father Gerard_, p. ccxxxviii. There is one consideration on this subject which is of the highest importance, namely, that Garnet was the Provincial, that is to say the superior and the very highest authority among the Jesuits in England, at that time, and therefore the Jesuit of all others most in communication with Rome, and most likely to know the mind of the General of his Order as well as that of the Holy Father himself. During October, not only Catesby, but other conspirators visited Gothurst. Among these was Fawkes, the adventurer who was intended to be actual perpetrator of the terrible deed. He was not altogether ill-born, being a member of an at least respectable family in Yorkshire, his father having been Registrar and Advocate of the Consistory Court of York Minster.[226] He was thirty-five years old, and he had seen much of the world, having entered the Spanish army in Flanders and been at the taking of Calais by the Archduke Albert in 1596.[227] He was a man, too, who made some profession of devotion as a Catholic.[228] Father Greenway describes him as[229] "a man of great piety, of exemplary temperance, of mild and cheerful demeanour, an enemy of broils and disputes, a faithful friend, and remarkable for his punctual attendance upon religious observances." He had been to Spain, on the private embassy to Philip II. with Christopher Wright, and he had a brother then a barrister in one of the Inns of Court in London. Therefore he was not ill-fitted by his antecedents to be received as a guest at Gothurst, shrink as we may from the idea of such a man being admitted to the house of the gentle Lady Digby. [226] Jardine's G. P., p. 36. [227] Beeton's Encyclopaedia, Vol. i.