Surely, the twain facts that Thomas Ward “walked up and down,” and that his brother, Marmaduke, was also at large, with the latter’s eldest daughter, Mary, lodging in Baldwin’s Gardens, Holborn (although we have seen the Master of Newby apprehended in Warwickshire, in the very heart and centre of the conspirators), tend to demonstrate that the King, his Privy Council, and Government were very much obligated to the gentleman-servant and, almost certainly, distant kinsman of William Parker fourth Lord Mounteagle, and that they knew it.[A]
[A] Is it possible that some time after the Plot, Thomas Ward retired into his native Yorkshire, and became the officer or agent for Lord William Howard’s and his wife’s Hinderskelfe and other Yorkshire, Durham, and Westmoreland estates? I think it is possible; for I find the name “Thomas Warde” from time to time in the “Household Books of Lord William Howard” (Surtees Soc). See Supplementum III. I am inclined to think that the reason Father Richard Holtby, the distinguished Yorkshire Jesuit, who was socius, or secretary, to Father Henry Garnet, and subsequently Superior of the Jesuits in England, was never laid hold of by the Government, was that Holtby had two powerful friends at Court in Lord William Howard, of Naworth and Hinderskelfe Castles, and in Thomas Warde (or Ward). Father Holtby was born at Fryton Hall, in the Parish of Hovingham, between Hovingham and Malton. Now, Fryton is less than a mile from Slingsby, where I suspect Thomas Warde (or Ward) finally settled down, and both are only a few miles distant from Hinderskelfe Castle, now Castle Howard. Fryton Old Hall is at present, I believe, occupied by Mr. Leaf, and is the property of Charles James Howard ninth Earl of Carlisle, the descendant of Lord William Howard. The late Captain Ward, R.N., of Slingsby Hall, I surmise, was a descendant, lineal or collateral, of Thomas Ward, of the days of Queen Elizabeth and King James I.
From a grateful King and Country, Lord Mounteagle received, as we have already learned, a payment of £700 a year, equal to nearly £7,000 a year in our money.[A]
[A] Lord Mounteagle’s reward was £300 per annum for life, and £200 per annum to him and his heirs for ever in fee farm rents. Salisbury declared that Mounteagle’s Letter was “the first and only means” the Government had to discover that “most wicked and barbarous Plot.” Personally, I am bound to say I believe him. The title Lord Morley and Mounteagle is now in abeyance (see Burke’s “Extinct Peerages”); but let us hope that we may see it revived. An heir must be in existence, one would imagine; for the peerages Morley and Mounteagle would be granted by the Crown for ever, I presume. There is at the present date a Lord Monteagle, whose title is of a more recent creation.
But Ben Jonson, the rare Ben Jonson, the friend of Shakespeare, of Donne,[B] and other wits of the once
far-famed Mermaid Tavern, Bread Street, London, deemed the temporal saviour of his Country to be still insufficiently requited. So the Poet, invoking his Muse, penned, in the young peer’s honour, the following stately epigram: —
[B] John Donne the celebrated metaphysical poet, afterwards Dean of St. Paul’s, and author of the once well-known “Pseudo-Martyr,” which Donne wrote at the request of King James himself. For one of Donne’s ancestors and descendants, see ante p. [160].
Henry Donne (or Dunne), a barrister, was brother to John Donne. He was, I believe, implicated in the Babington conspiracy along with Edward Abington, brother to Thomas Abington, and about ten other young papist gentlemen, some of very high birth, great wealth, and brilliant prospects. At the chambers of Henry Donne, in Thavies Inn, Holborn, London, “the Venerable” William Harrington, of Mount St. John, near Thirsk, was captured. Harrington fled to the College at Rheims to study for the priesthood, in consequence of the impression made upon him by Campion, who was harboured, in the spring of 1581, for ten days at Mount St. John; Campion there wrote his famous “Decem Rationes.” Harrington was executed at the London Tyburn, for his priesthood, in 1594. He is said to have struggled with the hangman when the latter began to quarter him alive. Harrington is mentioned in Archbishop Harsnett’s “Popish Impostures,” a book known to Shakespeare. Harrington was a second cousin to Guy Fawkes, through Guy’s paternal grandmother, Ellen Harrington, of York.