[A] Father Garnet was also employing Sir Edmund Baynham as his diplomatic intermediary with the Pope in order “to gain time,” so that meanwhile the plotters might find space for repentance! Garnet was apparently one of those men who though possessed of a profound knowledge of Man know little or nothing of men. Whereas Oldcorne seems to have had practical reason as well as theoretical wisdom. Oldcorne, I take it, had a good, strong, clear, practical head on his shoulders, which included in its armoury will, in the sense of power, as well as intellect and heart, and “where there’s a will there’s a way.”
Guy Fawkes probably was authorised to impart and possibly actually did, under the oath, impart some knowledge of the Plot to Captain Hugh Owen, a Welsh Roman Catholic soldier of fortune serving in Flanders under the Archdukes.[102] Owen’s name figures in the Earl of Salisbury’s instructions to Sir Edward Coke, the Attorney-General who prosecuted the surviving Gunpowder conspirators in the historic Westminster Hall.
Moreover, I have thought that at least some of the powder must have been purchased in Flanders through the good offices of the said Captain Owen. The powder and the mining tools and implements appear to have been stored at first in the house at Lambeth and placed under the charge of Robert Keyes and, eventually, of Christopher Wright. The powder was, I take it, packed in bags, and the bags themselves packed in padlocked hampers. Afterwards, I conclude, the powder bags were deposited in the barrels, and the barrels themselves carried by two of the conspirators, with aid of brewers’ slings, and deposited in the cellar, which apparently had at least two doors.
CHAPTER XXXI.
Now, when deep within the depths of the moral being of Christopher Wright there first arose that tender day-spring, a realization of guilt and shame: that crimsoned dawn, a sense of grief and sorrow for those two high crimes whereby his wretched conscious-self had been made darksome and deformed: acts, wondrous in the telling, in that soul had been indeed wrought out; regard being had to the overmastering power of Man’s conditioned yet free will.
Furthermore, the historical Inquirer cannot but seek, if possible, by the exercise of the philosophic faculty, to penetrate to what, on the human side, may have been the originating cause, the moving spring, of the limited yet responsible moral nature of a guilty creature, whose eyes for well-nigh three hundred years have been closed by a violent death; of a guilty creature who, in the awful tragedy of his end, verified in himself, in the sight of all men, the sublimely terrible words of the old Greek tragedy, “The guilty suffer.”
For wrong-doing, by a steadfast law of the universal reason, “till time shall be no more,” will ever entail temporal punishment; and, by nature, expiation and atonement must be wrought out in the criminal’s own keen consciousness.
Yet, by a compensating law of universal reason, as inexorable as its fellow, according as Man does work out that measure of punishment, expiating and atoning, which