The dark lantern, now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, was left burning in the cellar by Fawkes.
CHAPTER XXIX.
Let me now make two quotations.
One is from the King’s Book, giving an account of the procedure followed by the Earl of Suffolk the Lord Chamberlain, and the Lord Mounteagle, the champion, protector, and hero of the England of his day, in whose honour the “rare” Ben Jonson[96] himself composed the epigram transcribed at the end of this Inquiry.
The other quotation, collected from the relation of a certain interview between Catesby, Tresham, Mounteagle, and Father Garnet, is one which plainly shows that Mounteagle was closely associated with Catesby, not merely as a passive listener but as an active sympathiser, as late as the month of July, 1605, in general treasonable internal projects, which indeed only just fell short of particular treasonable external acts.
But this, of course, does not prove any complicity of Mounteagle in the particular designment known as the Gunpowder Treason Plot, of which diabolical scheme, I have no reasonable doubt, the happy, debonair, pleasure-loving, but withal shrewd and generous, young nobleman was perfectly innocent.
These two quotations show, first, how zealously and faithfully Mounteagle of the Janus-face, looking both before and after — as henceforward we must regard him — kept his hand on the pulse of the Government at the most critical hour of his country’s annals, with a view to doing what both he and his mentor deemed to be
justice in the rightful claims and demands, though diverse and conflicting, of each group of “clients.”