I have thought it well to set forth the pleadings on both sides, though it has led me somewhat out of my appointed track. Though our sympathies are with the weaker and oppressed party, it cannot be said that Digby’s letter meets the whole case which Salisbury had raised. Whether that be so or not, it is enough, for our present purpose if we are able to discern that Salisbury had a case, and was not merely manœuvring for place or power. At all events, his opinion, whether it were bad or good, had, in the spring of 1605, been accepted by James, and he was therefore in less need even than in the preceding year of producing an imaginary or half-imaginary plot to frighten to his side a king who had already come round to his ideas.
CHAPTER VII
THE GOVERNMENT AND THE PRIESTS
It was unavoidable that the persecution to which Catholics were subjected should bear most hardly on the priests, who were held guilty of disseminating a disloyal religion. It is therefore no matter for surprise that we find, about April 1604,[259] an informer, named Henry Wright, telling Cecil that another informer named Davies, was able to set, i.e. to give information of the localities of above threescore more priests, but that he had told him that twenty principal ones would be enough. Davies, adds Wright, will not discover the treason till he had a pardon for it himself, and on this Father Gerard remarks ‘that the treason in question was none other than the Gunpowder Plot there can be no question; unless, indeed, we are to say that the authorities were engaged in fabricating a bogus conspiracy for which there was no foundation whatever in fact.’ Why this inference should be drawn I do not know. If Davies was a renegade priest he would require a pardon, and in order to get it he may very well have told a story about a treason which the authorities, on further inquiry, thought it needless to investigate further. It is to no purpose that Father Gerard produces an application to James in which it is stated that Wright had furnished information to Popham and Challoner who ‘had a hand in the discovery of the practices of the Jesuits in the powder plot, and did reveal the same from time to time to your Majesty, for two years’ space almost before the said treason burst forth.’[260] That Wright, being in want of money, made the most of his little services in spying upon Jesuits is likely enough; but if he had come upon Gunpowder Plot two years before the Monteagle letter, that is to say, in October, 1603, some five months before it was in existence, except, perhaps, in Catesby’s brain, we may be certain that he would have been far more specific in making his claim. The same may be said of Wright’s letter to Salisbury on March 26, 1606, in which he pleads for assistance ‘forasmuch as his Majesty is already informed of me that in something I have been, and that hereafter I may be, a deserving man of his Majesty and the State in discovering of villainous practices.’ Very gentle bleating indeed for a man who had found out the Gunpowder Plot, as I have just said, before it was in existence!
Nor is much more to be made of the remainder of Father Gerard’s evidence on this head. The world being what it was, what else could be expected but that there should be talk amongst priests of possible risings—Sir Everard Digby in his letter predicted as much—or even that some less wise of their number should discuss half formed plans, or that renegade priests should pick up their reckless words and report them to the Government, probably with some additions of their own?[261] When Father Gerard says that a vague statement by an informer, made as early as April 1604, refers to the Gunpowder Plot, because Coke said two years later that it did,[262] he merely shows that he has little acquaintance with the peculiar intellect of that idol of the lawyers of the day. If Father Gerard had studied, as I have had occasion to do, Coke’s treatment of the case of the Earl and Countess of Somerset, he would, I fancy, have come to the conclusion that whenever Coke smelt a mystery, there was a strong probability that it either never existed at all, or, at all events, was something very different from what Coke imagined it to be.
That the Government believed, with or without foundation, that there were plots abroad, and that priests had their full share in them, may be accepted as highly probable. It must, however, be remembered that in Salisbury’s eyes merely to be a priest was ipso facto to be engaged in a huge conspiracy, because to convert an Englishman to the Roman Catholic faith, or to confirm him in it, was to pervert him from his due allegiance to the Crown. Regarded from this point of view, the words addressed by Salisbury to Edmondes on October 17, 1605, ‘more than a week,’ as Father Gerard says, ‘before the first hint of danger is said to have been breathed,’[263] are seen to be perfectly in character, without imagining that the writer had any special information on the Gunpowder Plot, or any intention of making use of it to pave the way for more persecuting legislation than already existed.
“I have received” writes Salisbury, “a letter of yours ... to which there needeth no great answer for the present ... because I have imparted to you some part of my conceit concerning the insolencies of the priests and Jesuits, whose mouths we cannot stop better than by contemning their vain and malicious discourses, only the evil which biteth is the poisoned bait, wherewith every youth is taken that cometh among them, which liberty (as I wrote before) must for one cause or other be retrenched.”[264]
This language appears to Father Gerard to be ominous of further persecution. To me it appears to be merely ominous of an intention to refuse passports to young men of uncertain religion wishing to travel on the Continent.