CHAPTER LV.
Father Garnet did not go nearer London than Gothurst, in Buckinghamshire, between ten and fifteen miles distant from Great Harrowden.
We know that he was at Gothurst when Catesby was there, on Tuesday, the 22nd of October, one day after the date of the post scriptum mentioned in the last chapter. Probably the post scriptum of the 21st October was written at Gothurst and not at Great Harrowden, though the letter itself of the 4th October undoubtedly was penned at Harrowden, between ten and fifteen miles distant from Gothurst, as just remarked.
The Honourable Anne Vaux, whose maternal grandfather was Sir Thomas Beaumont, Master of the Rolls, was a level-headed woman of acute mental perceptions as well as of great moral ardour and intense spiritual exaltation.[A]
[A] The psychologist will have observed that these qualities are not seldom combined in a certain order of minds. Cf., Shakespeare’s “great wits to madness are near allied” — some thinkers will be inclined to say.
Miss Vaux was allied to both Catesby and Tresham, and their words, and still more their doings, during the few months then last past, had been not unnoticed by her. She evidently had that strange premonitory foreboding, that curious sense of swift approaching doom, which have marked all tragedies written or unwritten since the world began.
Moreover, the large number of cavalry horses in the stables of Norbrook and Huddington (those places being her
fellow-pilgrims’ and her own places of sojourning when en route for Holywell) had alarmed Anne Vaux’s imagination. And in reply to the lady’s anxious inquiries she had been told by her iniquitous, head-strong connections — Catesby and the rest — that the horses were wanted for the troop of horse whereof Catesby was to be in charge, with King James’s permission, in aid of the cause of the Spanish Archdukes in the Low Countries, then still in rebellion against the Spanish sovereignty.
Again; at either Harrowden or Gothurst, Miss Vaux sought out her father’s friend, and her own honoured and beloved spiritual counsellor, the chief of the English Jesuits, and told him that she feared that some trouble or disorder was a-brewing; and, moreover, that some of the gentlewomen, namely, the wives of the conspirators, “had demanded of her where they should bestow themselves until the burst was past in the beginning of the Parliament.”