Moreover, none of the estates of the plotters were
forfeited. And this, regard being had to the fact that the plotters were “moral monsters,” and to the well-known impecuniosity of the tricky James and his northern satellites, is itself a circumstance pregnant with the greatest possible suspicion that there was some great mystery in the background. — See Lathbury’s “Guy Fawkes,” pp. 76, 77, first Edition.
For, even if deeds of marriage settlement intervened to protect the plotters’ estates, an Act of Parliament surely could have swept them away like the veriest cobwebs. For Sir Edward Coke himself might have told the King and Privy Council that “an Act of Parliament could do anything, short of turning a man into a woman,” if the King and Council had needed enlightening on the point.
CHAPTER XLIII.
Again: the primary instinct of self-preservation alone would have assuredly impelled the bravest of the brave amongst the nine malefactors, including Tresham, who were incarcerated in the Tower of London, either to seek to save his life when awaiting his trial in Westminster Hall, or, at any rate, when expecting the scaffold, the ripping knife, the embowelling fork, and the quartering block, in St. Paul’s Churchyard or in the old Palace Yard, Westminster, to seek to save his life, by divulging the mighty secret respecting his responsibility for the Letter of Letters, had anyone of them in point of fact penned the document. For “skin for skin all that a man hath will he give for his life.”
Hence, from the silence of one and all of the survivors — a silence as unbroken as that of the grave — we can, it stands to reason, draw but this one conclusion, namely, that the nine surviving Gunpowder conspirators were stayed and restrained by the omnipotence of the impossible from declaring that anyone of them had saved his King and Parliament.
Hence, by consequence, the revealing conspirator must be found amongst that small band of four who survived not to tell the tale.
Therefore is our Inquiry reduced to within a narrow compass, a fact which simplifies our task unspeakably.