Now, if Dr. Williams solemnly had said that he knew Mrs. Abington personally, and that she (Mrs. Abington) had told him (Williams) with her own lips that she had writ the Letter, the case would have been a good way towards being established: assuming the lady to have been intellectually and morally capable at the time when she made such statement, and Williams himself a man whose word could be relied on.
Or, if Mr. Abington had told Williams that he knew his wife had writ the Letter because he saw with his own eyes the lady do it, then the case would have been also a good way towards being established.
Or, if Mr. Abington had told Williams that he believed his wife had writ the Letter because she had told him (Abington) she had done so immediately after she alleged she had performed the meritorious deed, the case would have been some slight way towards being established.
But when the only shred or patch of evidence we have to support the stupendous article of belief that Mrs. Abington accomplished the immortal feat is an uncircumstantial, uncorroborated allegation by Dr. Williams that some person or another unknown (on the most favourable view) told him (Williams) that Mrs. Abington had writ the Letter merely because her husband said so, then the case for Mrs. Abington’s authorship of the document is in no way towards being established.
And, therefore, the story falls to the ground.
And, therefore, it should be, in reason, henceforward consigned to the limbo of exploded myths and idle tales.
It is true that Dr. Nash in his work on Worcestershire,[115] written in the eighteenth century and published in 1780, declares that “Tradition in this county says that she [i.e., Mrs. Abington] was the person who wrote the Letter to her brother, which discovered the Gunpowder Plot.”
But then, obviously, this alleged tradition is absolutely worthless, unless it can be shown to have been a continuous tradition from the year 1605 down to the time when Nash was writing his “History.” For if the tradition sprang up at a later date, for the purposes of true history its value as a tradition is plainly nothing.
The learned David Jardine — to whom all students of the Gunpowder Plot will be for ever indebted for his labours in this conspiracy of conspiracies — in his “Narrative,” published in the year 1857, and to which reference has been already frequently made in the course of this Inquiry, says,[116] “No contemporary writer alludes to Mrs. Abington as the author of the Letter.”
And Jardine evidently does not think that the penmanship of the document can be brought home to this lady.