[254] Lindsay to James I. Jan. 26/Feb. 5, 1605, S. P. Italian States.
[255] Compare the last passage quoted from Molin’s despatch, p. 161.
[256] This is, however, precisely what James had failed to induce the Pope to do.
[257] Father Gerard asks what ‘our offence’ was. It was clearly nothing personal to the writer, and I am strongly inclined to interpret the words as referring to Lindsay’s proceedings at Rome, of which so much had been made.
[258] Sir Everard Digby to Salisbury (S. P. Dom. xvii. 10.) As Father Gerard says, the date cannot be earlier than May 4, 1605, when the Earldom was conferred on Cranborne.
[259] Father Gerard gives the date of Davies’s pardon from the Pardon Roll as April 25, 1605. It should be April 23, 1604.
[260] Gerard, 94, 95, 254. Father Gerard ascribes this application to ‘a later date’ than March 1606. It was, in fact a good deal later, as the endorsement ‘Mr. Secretary Conway’ shows that it was not earlier than 1623. The further endorsement ‘touching Wright and his services performed in the damnable plot of the Powder Treason,’ proves nothing. What did Conway’s clerk know beyond the contents of the application itself?
[261] Father Gerard (p. 98) tells us of one Thomas Coe, who wrote on Dec. 20, 1605, telling him that he had forwarded to the King ‘the primary intelligence of these late treasons.’ If this claim was justified, why do we not find Coe’s name, either amongst the State Papers or on the Patent Rolls, as recipient of some favour from the Crown? A still more indefensible argument of Father Gerard’s is one in which a letter written to Sir Everard Digby about an otter hunt is held (p. 103) to show the existence of Government espionage, because though written before Digby was acquainted with the plot it is endorsed, ‘Letter written to Sir Everard Digby—Powder Treason.’ Any letter in Digby’s possession would be likely to be endorsed in this way whatever its contents might have been.
[262] Gerard, pp. 95, 96.
[263] Gerard, p. 106.