Surely the answer is that people who have shown that they can rule Humanity because first they have themselves obeyed princely ideals of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. Nothing short of this can satisfy the universal conscience of mankind.
What have our men of light and leading been about that they have not explained clearly and straight from the shoulder these truths to the world long, long ago? Had they done so, how much innocent blood might have been never spilt! How many bitter tears might have been never shed!
[A] See “Life of Mary Queen of Scots,” by Samuel Cowan (Sampson, Low, 1901); also “The Mystery of Mary Stuart,” by Andrew Lang (Longmans, 1901).
[3] — Lord Mounteagle had been a party to the sending of Thomas Winter and Father Oswald Tesimond into Spain in 1601 to negotiate with King Philip III. of Spain an invasion of England with an army on Elizabeth’s death. In 1601 he seems to have been a prisoner in the house of Mr. Newport, of Bethnal Green. But in 1602 he was with Catesby at White Webbs, by Enfield Chase, near London; so he was then at liberty. On the accession of James I., Mounteagle — along with the Earl of Southampton (Shakespeare’s patron and friend), and Francis and Lewis Tresham — held the Tower of London for the King, who seems to have welcomed Mounteagle at Court from the first. After James’s accession Christopher Wright and Guy Fawkes were sent on a mission to Spain to urge upon the Spanish King to invade the realm. This mission seems to have been a continuation of the mission in 1601 of Winter and Tesimond. Mounteagle, however, took no part or lot in despatching the second mission. (It is important to notice the fact that as far back as 1601 and 1603 Thomas Winter and Tesimond, Christopher Wright and Fawkes, were co-workers in revolutionary designs against the Government of the day.)
Mounteagle’s father, Lord Morley, was living in 1605. He did not die till 1618, when his son and heir succeeded him as eleventh Baron Morley. Mounteagle was called to the House of Lords in the autumn of 1605, under the title of Baron Mounteagle, in right of his mother. “Mounteagle,” says Father Oswald Tesimond, alias Greenway, “was either actually a Catholic in opinion and in the interior of his heart, or was very well-disposed towards the Catholics, being a friend of several of the conspirators and related to some of them.” After the Plot, Mounteagle evidently left
the religion of his ancestors, though his wife (née Tresham) continued constant herein, and brought up her children Catholics; but Mounteagle “died a Catholic.”
Jardine thinks that Mounteagle held some ceremonial office at Court, probably in the Household of Queen Anne of Denmark, wife of James I., who was at heart a Roman Catholic, though most probably never received into that Church. — See “Carmel in England” (Burns & Oates, 1899), p. 30. We hear of Mounteagle about ten days before the 5th November, 1605, calling at the Palace at Richmond to kiss the Prince’s hands (i.e., Henry Prince of Wales). Thomas Winter told Catesby that Mounteagle, at that time, gathered from what he heard at the Royal Household that the Prince would not be present at the opening of Parliament. Somerset House was Queen Anne’s Palace. It would be the centre for all the most brilliant wits, ambassadors, and diplomatists of the day.
[4] — The Earl of Arundel and Lord William Howard were half-brothers. (Lord William Howard was “the Belted Will Howard,” renowned in Border story as the scourge of the lawless moss-trooper. For a description of this remarkable man see Sir Walter Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel.”) The half-brothers were both the sons of that unfortunate nobleman, Thomas fourth Duke of Norfolk, who in 1572 was beheaded for aspiring to the hand of Mary Queen of Scots. Lord Arundel died in the Tower of London in 1595, “a Martyr-in-will for the Ancient Faith.” Though their father was a strong Protestant (being a pupil of John Fox, the author of Fox’s “Book of Martyrs”) both his sons, Philip and William, became strong Roman Catholics, as did his daughter, Margaret Lady Sackville. Philip Howard Earl of Arundel, losing his father when only fifteen years old, was, at an early age, drawn within the vortex of the gaieties of the Court of his kinswoman Queen Elizabeth. However, in the year 1581, while still a mere courtier and votary of pleasure, it happened he was present, we are told, at “the disputation in the Tower of London in 1581, concerning divers points of religion betwixt Fr. Edmond Campion of the Society of Jesus and some other Priests of the one part; Charke, Fulk, Whitaker, and some other Protestant Ministers of the other.” We are further told by his biographer, an unknown Jesuit writer of the seventeenth century, “By that he saw and heard there, he easily perceived on which side the Truth and true Religion was, tho’ at that time, nor untill a year or two after, he neither did nor intended to embrace and follow it: and after he did intend it a good while passed before he did execute it. For, as himself signify’d in a letter which he afterwards writ in the time of
his imprisonment in the Tower to Fr. Southwell, he resolved to become Catholic long before he could resolve to live as a Catholic, and thereupon he defer’d the former until he had an intent and resolute purpose to perform the latter. The which (being aided by a special grace of God) he made walking one day alone in the Gallery of his Castle at Arundel, where after a long and great conflict within himself, lifting up his eies and hands to Heaven, he firmly resolved to become a member of God’s Church, and to frame his life accordingly.”
Sir Robert Howard, in the reign of Henry VI., married the Lady Margaret Mowbray, daughter of Thomas De Mowbray Duke of Norfolk, and grand-daughter, maternally, of Richard Fitzalan Earl of Arundel (“Law Times,” 9th November, 1901). The motto of the Howards Dukes of Norfolk is, “Virtus sola invicta” — “Virtue alone unconquered.” The motto of the Howards Earls of Carlisle is, “Volo sed non valeo” — “I am willing, but I am not able.”