Upon a zealous convert, like Sir Everard Digby, such an assurance would exercise a great influence. Nor was it only of sacerdotal approval that Catesby boasted; he was able to add that he had obtained the consent, as well as the assistance, of John Wright, a Catholic layman and a Yorkshire squire; of Sir Everard’s own friend, Thomas Winter; of his eldest brother, Robert Winter,[156] “an earnest Catholic,”at whose house the pilgrims to St Winefride’s Well had stayed for a night on their way thither; of Ambrose Rookwood, a Catholic,[157] “ever very devout,”who had actually been one of the pilgrims; of John Grant,[158] “a zealous Roman Catholic,”who, like his brother-in-law, Robert Winter, had entertained the St Winifride’s pilgrims for a night in his walled and moated house, and of Thomas Percy, a relative of the Earl of Northumberland’s, and a very recent and earnest convert to the Church.
FOOTNOTES:
[122] S. P. Gunpowder Plot Book, Part I, No. 108.
[123] Ib.
[124] So it is usually believed, and so wrote Ben Jonson—“Upon his birthday, the eleventh of June”;—so, too, Richard Farrar—“Born on the day he died, the eleventh of June.”But some authorities give a different date, and the question has been fiercely disputed.
[125] Father H. Garnet and the Gunpowder Plot, by J. H. Pollen, S. J., p. 15.
[126] A party, including ladies, would not be likely to travel faster than thirty miles a day over the bad roads, therefore it would take more than four times as long to go, then, from Gothurst to Holywell, as it would now take to go from Gothurst to the famous shrine at Lourdes, in the Pyrenees.
[127] Cal. Sta. Pa. Dom., 1603-10, p. 270.
[128] Father Garnet and the Gunpowder Plot, Pollen, p. 18.
[129] Jardine, in his Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot (p. 180), says that the ladies walked barefoot from Holt, that is to say, a distance of about twenty miles.