Therefore Christopher Wright must have become a confederate about ten months after Fawkes himself and the other prime movers in the nefarious scheme, and his services were requisitioned — as the modern phrase goes — primarily for the purpose of adding to the amount of manual labour available for the digging of the mine, which was afterwards abandoned for the cellar as the receptacle for the gunpowder that was to effect the explosion purposed.
(2) Now, was Christopher Wright a conspirator whose early training was such as to lead him, on reflection, to regard as morally unlawful the taking of a secret oath such as the Gunpowder conspirators had bound themselves by, and one in whose heart emotions, not only of compassion but also of compunction, were likely to be awakened by the remembrance of that training as the day was about to dawn and the hour was about to strike when the awful tragedy would be consummated?
If a man’s character may be presumptively known by his friends, still more may it be presumptively known by his progenitors; and in the light of this principle I therefore answer the foregoing question emphatically in the affirmative.
But what was the form of the oath taken by all these conspirators save one, namely, Sir Everard Digby, who was specially “sworn in” on the hilt of a poniard?
It was this: — “You shall swear by the Blessed Trinity and by the Sacrament you now propose to receive,
never to disclose, directly or indirectly, by word or circumstance, the matter that shall be proposed to you, to keep secret nor desist from the execution thereof until the rest shall give you leave.”
This oath was administered to the conspirators by each other in the most solemn manner — “kneeling down upon their knees with their hands laid upon a primer.”[39]
Immediately after the oath had been taken,[40] we are told, Catesby explained to Percy, and Winter and John Wright to Fawkes, that the project intended was to blow up the Parliament House with gunpowder when the King went to the House of Lords.[41] This would include the Queen, the Commons, Ambassadors, and spectators who would be present during the King’s Speech.
From Fawkes’ “Confession,” already quoted, it would seem probable that all five prime conspirators imparted their prodigious designment of sacrilegious, cold-blooded murder to the conspirator Christopher Wright.