returned to Catesby with the following answer: That the existence of the mine had been communicated to the Ministers. This Tresham said he knew: but by whom the discovery had been made he knew not.”
Lingard does not give his authority, but probably he got the material for this important passage from “Greenway’s (vere Tesimond’s) MS.” It is an historical desideratum that this MS. should be published. Mounteagle, conceivably, may have falsely told Tresham that the Government already knew of the mine, in order to alarm him the more effectually; but, most probably, it was an inference that Tresham himself erroneously drew from Mounteagle’s words, whatever may have been their precise nature. Mounteagle possibly said something about “the mine,” and that the Parliament Houses would be with minuteness searched far and near. This would be quite sufficient to inflame the already heated imagination of Tresham, and he would readily enough leap forth to the conclusion that the “mine” must be for certain known to the Government.
One can almost feel the heart-beats of the distraught Tresham as one reads the relation of his second interview with Winter. Then from the pulsations of one human heart, O, Earth’s governors and ye governed, learn all. For the study of true History is big with mighty lessons and “he that hath ears let him hear.” Let him hear that Truth and Right, although each is, in its essential nature, a simple unity, and therefore imperially exclusive in its claims, and therefore intolerant of plurality, of multiplicity, of diversity, yet that each of these high attributes of the eternal and the ideal is the mistress not only of man’s god-like intellect, but also of his heart and will. And these two faculties are likewise of divine original and have severally a voice which perpetually bids man, poor wounded man, “be pitiful, be courteous” to his fellows. For human life at best is “hard,” is “brief,” and “piercing are its sorrows.”
[94] — The meeting between Catesby, Winter, and Tresham, at Barnet, on the road to White Webbs, was on Friday, the 1st of November, the day the Letter was shown to the King.
[95] — Or, Mounteagle may have thought that, as it would be meritorious in Percy supposing he had sent the Letter, he (Mounteagle) would expressly, in the hearing of Suffolk, give Percy the benefit of the doubt; since it might stand his old friend in good stead hereafter if Percy were involved in the meshes of the law for the part that, I hold, Mounteagle by Christopher Wright through Thomas Warde then knew for a fact, Percy, and indeed all his confederates, had taken in the nefarious enterprise. Such a
train of thought may have flashed through Mounteagle’s brain well-nigh instantaneously; for what is quicker than thought? I suspect, moreover, that Mounteagle conjectured that the Letter was from one of Warde’s and his own connections: for Percy, as well as the Wrights, would be a connection of Mounteagle, through the Stanleys, Percies, Gascoignes, Nortons, Nevilles, and Wardes, who were all more or less allied by marriages entered into within the last few generations. Percy would be about Thomas Warde’s own age (forty-six).
I do not, however, think that Mounteagle knew for certain who was the revealing conspirator; and his lordship would not want to know either. Besides, I hold that Warde would be too good a diplomatist and too faithful a servant to suffer his master to know, even if he had wanted. “Say ‘little’ is a bonnie word,” would be a portion of the diplomatic wisdom that Warde would carry with him up to the great metropolis from his “native heather” of Yorkshire.
[96] — Ben Jonson was “reconciled” to the Church of Rome either in 1593 or 1594. After, and probably on account of, the Plot he left the Church, whose “exacting claims” he had “on trust” accepted. Possibly it was under the influence of Jonson’s example that Mounteagle wrote the letter to the King, given in the Rev. John Gerard’s “What was the Gunpowder Plot?” p. 256. Mounteagle, however, died in the Church of Rome, and the Article in the “National Dictionary of Biography” says that he had a daughter a nun. Belike, she was a member of the Institute of “The English Virgins,” for the name “Parker” is mentioned in Chambers’ “Life of Mary Ward.”[A] There has been recently (1900) published a smaller “Life of Mary Ward,” by M. Mary Salome (Burns & Oates), with a Preface by Bishop Hedley, O.S.B., which should be read by those not desirous of possessing the more costly work by Mary Catharine Elizabeth Chambers, in 2 vols. (Burns & Oates), with a Preface by the late Henry James Coleridge, S.J. (brother to the late Lord Coleridge). May I express
the hope that these two learned authoresses will cause the Ward Papers, at Nymphenburg, near Munich, in Germany (that are extant), to be carefully examined afresh to see if they contain anything about Thomas Warde, Mary’s uncle, and anything further about her connection, through the Throckmortons and Nevilles, the Lord Mounteagle? By so doing, they will cause to be obliged to them all serious students of the Gunpowder Plot, which is of perennial interest and value to human beings, whether governors or governed, by reason of the intellectual, moral, and political lessons that with the truest eloquence — the eloquence of Fact — it teaches mankind for all time.
[A] Whilst it is possible that the “Parker” mentioned in the “Life of Mary Ward” was one of Lord Mounteagle’s daughters, I find, from a statement in Foley’s “Records,” vol. v. (by a contemporary hand, I think), that “Lord Morley and Mounteagle,” as he is styled, had a daughter who was “crooked,” and who was an Augustinian nun. Her name was Sister Frances Parker. Her father is said to have given his consent to this daughter becoming a nun “after much ado.” Lady Morley and Mounteagle, a strict papist, brought up the children Roman Catholics. — See Foley’s “Records,” vol. v., p. 973. — The same writer is of opinion that Mounteagle was not a Roman Catholic. Evidently he was a very lax one, and between the Plot and the time of his death he probably conformed to the Establishment.