Five days later,[214] Southwaick again writes to Munck, inclosing a note of the priests who have had meetings in Paris, or have been written to in England. The Ambassador (in Paris) will, he says, bear witness that, although unable to particularize, he had given notice two months since that there was a plot brewing. He adds a significant hint, the like of which we have already seen: "Should I chance to be apprehended, I will rest myself upon my honourable Lord."[215]
Meanwhile the English ambassadors abroad were no less active and vigilant than the informers at home, and while clearly aware that there was some danger on foot, never doubted that the king's government would not be caught napping.
On the 9th of October, Sir Thomas Edmondes wrote to Cecil from Brussels[216] to warn him of suspicious symptoms in the Low Countries; and on the following day Cecil wrote to Edmondes[217] expressing apprehensions of trouble from the Jesuits abroad. On the same day, October 10th, Sir Thomas Parry wrote from Paris to the secretary,[218] of a petition which the Catholics were preparing against the meeting of Parliament, "and some further designs upon refusal;" and in another letter informed Edmondes:[219] "somewhat is at present in hand amongst these desperate hypocrites, which I trust God shall divert, by the vigilant care of his Majesty's faithful servants and friends abroad, and prudence of his council at home."
That such confidence was not misplaced is shown by Cecil's assurance to Sir Thomas Parry,[220] mentioned above, that the proceedings of the priests were never unknown to Government.
Amongst the papers at Hatfield is a curious note, anonymous and undated, giving information of a plot involving murder and treason, which, like the letter to Monteagle, simulates rather too obviously the workmanship of an illiterate person, and artfully insinuates that the design in question is undertaken in the name of religion, and chiefly favoured by the priests.[221]
Another remarkable document is preserved in the same collection. This is a letter written to Sir Everard Digby, June 11th, 1605, and treating of an otter hunt to be undertaken when the hay shall be cut. It has, however, been endorsed by Salisbury, "Letter written to Sir Everard Digby—Powder Treason."[222] Not only is it hard to see how the terms of the document lend themselves to such an interpretation, but the date at which it was written was fully three months prior to Digby's initiation in the conspiracy. The idea is certainly suggested that, far from being passive and indolent, the authorities were sedulously seeking pretexts to entangle as many as possible of those "great of name," concerning whom we have already heard from one of their informers. This much, at any rate, seems clear. Those at the centre of this complex web of espionage, to whom were addressed all these informations and admonitions, cannot have been, as they protested somewhat overmuch, in a state of careless inactivity, depending for security only upon the protection of the Almighty, "who," as the secretary afterwards piously declared, "blessed us in our slumber [and] will not forsake us now that we are awake."[223]
The slumber would at least appear not to have been dreamless. On the one hand, the secretary was evidently much exercised by a threatened rapprochement between his royal master and Pope Clement VIII., who, through a Scotch Catholic gentleman, Sir James Lindsay, had sent a friendly message to King James, which had elicited a courteous and almost cordial reply.[224] The significance of this Cecil strenuously endeavoured, in a letter to the Duke of Lenox,[225] to explain away, and in February, 1604-5, we find him assuring the Archbishop of York with an earnestness somewhat suspicious,[226] "I love not to procure or yield any toleration; a matter which I well know no creature living durst propound to our religious Sovereign." For himself, he thus declares: "I will be much less than I am, or rather nothing at all, before I shall become an instrument of such a miserable change." Nevertheless, on the 17th of April following, he was fain to acknowledge, in writing to Parry,[227] that the news of Pope Clement's death had much eased him in his mind.
It would, however, appear that the spectre of possible toleration still haunted him, and that he felt it necessary to commit the king to a course of severity. In a minute of September 12th, 1605, addressed to the same ambassador, which has been corrected and amended with an amount of care sufficiently testifying to the importance of the subject,[228] after speaking of "the plots and business of the priests," and the tendency of Englishmen going abroad "in this time of peace" to become Catholics, he thus continues: "Only this is it wherein my own heart receiveth comfort, that we live under a most religious and understanding Prince, who sticketh not to publish, as well in his own particular, as in the form of his government, how contrary that religion is to his resolution, and how far he will be from ever gracing [it]." He goes on to declare that nothing will so avail to make his Majesty withdraw his countenance from any man as such "falling away."
About the same time as this was written, we are told by a writer, almost a contemporary,[229] that a dependent of Cecil's warned a Catholic gentleman, by name Buck, of a "wicked design" which his master had in hand against the papists.
On the 17th of October, more than a week before the first hint of danger is said to have been breathed, we find the minister writing to Sir Thomas Edmondes, at Brussels,[230] in terms which certainly appear to couple together the growing danger of conversions to Catholicism, of which we have heard above, and the remedy soon to be supplied by the new policy which the discovery of the Plot so effectively established. He speaks of the "insolencies" of the priests and Jesuits, who are doing much injury by infecting with their poison "every youth that cometh amongst them;" ominously adding, "which liberty must, for one cause or another, be retrenched."