Yea, indeed, this was a part of the truth, no doubt. But the remainder of the truth, I suggest, was that the Plot of Plots Garnet had learned, a few days after the aforesaid Michaelmas, was being assuredly squashed by Edward Oldcorne.
Poor Henry Garnet, a sorry, pathetic figure in the history of his Country, surely. Yet, because much was lost, he knew that it did not therefore follow that all was lost. For this gifted, distraught, erring man still held “something sacred, something undefiled, some pledge and keepsake of his better nature.”
That something was his point of honour as a Priest of the Catholic Church.[A]
[A] How many a gallant soldier and sailor in our own day, young and old, has been sustained in life and death by the consoling infinite thought of fidelity to the commands of a lawful superior; by the comforting transcendental thought of duty done! Cf., Frederic Denison Maurice’s fine passage on the inspiring and ennobling idea of Duty, in his “Lectures on the Epistles of St. John (Macmillan); also Wordsworth’s magnificent “Ode to Duty.”
CHAPTER LIII.
Sir Everard Digby had rented Coughton, near Alcester, in Warwickshire, from Thomas Throckmorton, Esquire, as a base for the warlike operations, which were to be conducted in the Midlands as soon as intelligence had arrived from London that the King, Lords Spiritual and Temporal, together with the Gentlemen of the House of Commons, “were now no more.”
On Sunday, the 3rd of November, the young knight rode from Coughton to Dunchurch, near Rugby.
Robert Winter the same day left Huddington and, sleeping on the Sunday night at Grafton, at the house of his father-in-law, John Talbot, Esquire, rode on to Coventry, in company with the younger Acton, of Ribbesford, and attended by several servants.