On first hearing of this inhuman, detestable, and diabolical scheme, Sir Everard was overcome with horror, as well he might be, and it was with the greatest difficulty that Catesby induced him to consider it any further.[141] If Sir Everard had been a man of firm will and determination of character, he would have obeyed his conscience and resolutely followed his own good instincts; but instead of doing so, he was weak enough to listen with attention and interest to the arguments of Catesby. To a man of a religious mind like Sir Everard Digby, those of a Scriptural character would be some of the most persuasive, and his companion would hardly fail to point out the wholesale massacres and cruelties apparently sanctioned in the Old Testament.
If he so pleased, he could quote plenty of biblical precedents for slaying and maiming, on a far larger scale than was proposed in the Gunpowder Plot, which would be a mere trifle in comparison with some of the following butcheries:—“They warred against the Midianites,”“and they slew all the males. And they slew the kings of Midian.”[142] “They slew of them in Bezek ten thousand men.”“And they slew of Moab at that time ten thousand men, all lusty, and all men of valour; and there escaped not a man.”[143] “David slew of the Syrians two and twenty thousand.”[144] “The other Jews,”“slew of their foes seventy and five thousand.”[145] “Pekah the son of Remaliah slew in Juda an hundred and twenty thousand in one day, which were all valiant men, because they had forsaken the Lord God of their fathers,”[146] just as King James and the English Government had forsaken Him, in Catesby’s and Sir Everard’s opinions.
If it were objected that all these fell in battle, and that it was quite a different thing to murder people by stealth in cold blood, could not Catesby have replied that “Jael Heber’s wife took a nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him [Sisera], and smote the nail into his temple, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died.”[147] Jael Heber’s wife was acting as hostess to a friend who had come into her tent for shelter and protection, and had fallen asleep. Yet Deborah and Barak sang in honour of this performance:—[148] “Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be, blessed shall she be above women in the tent. He asked water, and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter in a lordly dish. She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workman’s hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head, when she had pierced and stricken through his temples. At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead.”“So let all thine enemies perish, O Lord.”[149] Might not, and ought not, the English Catholics to sing much such a song in honour of Catesby, Digby, and their fellow-conspirators, when the king and the Parliament should be blown up, and fall, and lie down, at their feet, where they should fall down dead? Was there not something biblical and appropriate, again, in destroying the enemies of the Lord with fire? “Behold, they shall be as stubble; the fire shall burn them.”[150] “Thou shalt be fuel for the fire; thy blood shall be in the midst of the land.”[151] And had not the very gentlest of men, even the God-man, said, “I am come to send fire on the earth?”Surely, too, if Holy Writ did not specially mention gunpowder, it constantly threatened one of its ingredients, namely brimstone, to the wicked!
Under the old dispensation, it was considered a religious duty to fall upon the enemies of the Lord and slay them; under the new, it would be as religious a duty to get under them and slay them. This was merely a detail, a simple reversal of the process, conducing to exactly the same results, and quite as Scriptural in its character.
A massacre by means of an explosion of gunpowder was neither a novel nor an exclusively Catholic notion. Persons observed, “There be recounted in histories many attempts of the same kynds, and some also by Protestants in our days: as that of them who at Antwerp placed a whole barke of powder in the great street of that citty, where the prince of Parma with his nobility was to passe: and that of him in the Hague that would have blown up the whole councel of Holland upon private revenge.”[152]
Within the last half century, had not great earls and statesmen, in Scotland, conspired together to blow up with gunpowder the Queen’s own husband, as he lay ill in bed, in his house; had not four men been destroyed by this means,[153] and had not the principal conspirator “declared,”with how much truth or falsehood it is not necessary to pause here to inquire,[154] “that the Queen”—the very pious martyr-queen, Mary, herself,—“was a consenting party to the deed,”[155] and had not that very pious queen married that very conspirator after he had brought about the murder of her first husband?
It would be scarcely too much to say that, early in the seventeenth century, the ethics of explosives were not properly understood. Catesby might argue that gunpowder was a destructive agent, the primary and natural use of which was to kill directly, and that its indirect use, by exploding it in a tube, thereby propelling a missile, was a secondary, less natural, and possibly less legitimate use. And, if it were objected that to employ it in either way would be right in war, but wrong in peace, he could bring forward the exceedingly dangerous theory (which has been made use of by Irish-American dynamitards in the nineteenth century), that oppressed people, who do not acknowledge the authority of those who rule over them, may consider themselves at war with those authorities, a theory which Catesby’s Jesuit friends would have negatived instantly, if he had asked their opinion about it.
Any attempt to prove the iniquity of Catesby’s conspiracy is so unnecessary that I will not waste time in offering one. I have only to endeavour to imagine the condition of mind in which he and his friends were able to look upon it with approval, and the arguments they may have used in its favour.
Next to passages and precedents from Scripture in support of his diabolical scheme, Catesby would be well aware that its approval by authorities of the Church, and especially by Fathers of the Society of Jesus, would have most influence with his friend Sir Everard. To the surprise of the latter, he informed him that he had laid the matter before the Provincial of the Society, and had obtained his consent to the scheme.
He admitted that the Jesuits were not fully aware of all the particulars; it was not intended to put them to the dangers of responsibility for the deed itself, or anything connected with it; already their very priesthood was high treason, and the last thing that Catesby and his friends desired was to add to their perils; but their approval of the design in general was of such importance that neither Catesby himself, nor any of those admitted into the secret, would have acted without it, and this Catesby declared he had obtained.