“It was noted in him [i.e., Thomas Percy] and in Mr. John Wright (whose sister he afterwards married) that if they had heard of any man in the country to be esteemed more valiant and resolute than others, one or the other of them would surely have picked some quarrel against him and fought with him to have made trial of his valour.”
On the march then, with such relatives as these close at hand, there is no antecedent improbability, but the contrary, in the supposal that Christopher Wright used these words by way of a feint, to the end that he might, peradventure, draw his companions away from those scaring suspicions, by the haunting fear of which Wright’s self-consciousness would be sure to be continually visited.
For “Conscience doth make cowards of us all.”
Truly, “The guilty suffer.” And it was part of the awful temporal punishment wherewith severe, just Nemesis, the dread executioner of Destiny, visited this — I still hold, all outward shows to the contrary notwithstanding — repentant wrong-doer, that he should be fast bound to one of the spiked, lacerating wheels of a flying chariot that he desired, “to the finest fibre” of his tortured, writhing being, to have no part nor lot in driving: fast bound, for the residue of that all too brief mortal career, which, on that chill November morning, was rapidly drawing to its shattered close.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
What objection, then, can be brought against the hypothesis that Father Edward Oldcorne, Priest and Jesuit, and native of the City of York, was the Penman of this most momentous perhaps of all Letters ever writ by the hand of man?
It is this, that in a pamphlet by a certain Dr. Williams, published about the year 1680,[113] purporting to be a History of the Powder Treason, with a parallel between the Gunpowder Treason and the Titus Oates’ alleged Popish Plot of the reign of Charles II., there occurs the following statement: —
“Mrs. Habington was sister to the Lord Mounteagle and so being solicitous for her brother, whom she had reason to believe would be at the parliament, she writ the aforesaid letter to him, to give him so much notice of the danger as might warn him to provide for his own safety, but not so much (as she apprehended) as might discover it. From this relation betwixt the two families, it was that Mr. Habington alone of all the conspirators, after sentence, had his life given him. This account Mr. Habington himself gave to a worthy person still in being.” (The italics are mine.)