CHAPTER VII.
Believing that his principal friends, and the priests for whom he felt the greatest veneration, had either joined in or expressed their approval of the scheme, Sir Everard began to be half inclined to consent to it. Was there to be a great enterprise, entailing personal activity and danger for the good of the Catholic cause, and was he to shrink from taking part in it? Was he alone, among the most zealous Catholic laymen of England, to show the white feather in a time of peril? Could he call himself a man if he trembled at the very thought of bloodshed? Yet, in truth, the idea of the cold-blooded massacre which was proposed appalled him; fair fighting he would rather rejoice in, but wholesale assassination was to the last degree repulsive to his nature. Hesitating and miserable, he reached Gothurst with his guest without giving any definite answer to the question whether he would join in the conspiracy.
When they were in the house, Catesby showed him a book justifying proceedings which he claimed to be similar to the proposed plot. “I saw,”he wrote afterwards to his wife,[159] “I saw the principal point of the case, judged by a Latin book of M. D., my brother’s father-in-law.”What book it may have been we have no means of knowing; but we do know that the perils of comparing parallel cases are notorious: and, unfortunately, the production of this book had the effect of turning the scale, and inducing Digby to join in the infamous plot.
Necessary as it is for a biographer of Sir Everard Digby carefully to consider all the arguments that are likely to have influenced him in consenting to the Gunpowder Plot, it is all-important to keep before the mind the cause which, on his own admission,[160] was the first and most potent of his assent to the conspiracy. This was[161] “the friendship and love he bare to Catesby, which prevailed so much, and was so powerful with him, as that for his sake he was ever contented and ready to hazard himself and his estate.”
Sir Everard was a man of what may be termed violent friendship. We have already seen his almost immoderate attachment to Father Gerard. It was an excellent thing that he should have such a man for a firm friend; but his feeling towards him was something much more than that. Father Gerard was “his brother.”The Jesuits make a rule of avoiding what they term “particular friendships,”and the great aggression of affection would certainly not come from Father Gerard’s side. And now we find him loving Catesby to such an extent as to be “ready to hazard himself and his estate”“for his sake.”
There is such a thing as an undue admiration for “the man who thinks as I do.”It proceeds from a combination of pride and weakness. The man in question is the embodiment of “my”principles, and therefore to be worshipped, and, holding “my”principles, his decisions, which are presumably formed upon those principles, must be right, and “my”adoption of them will save me the trouble of forming any for myself. Such is the line of argument which men of Sir Everard Digby’s type mentally follow. When, again, some difficulty presents itself, concerning which they have never thought at all, they argue to themselves after this fashion. “My friend agrees with me about A, B, and C, topics on which we are both well informed; therefore I may safely follow his advice about D, a subject of which I at present know nothing, but about which, when I have studied it, I may logically assume that I shall agree with him.”
Few men act on principle at first hand. To a vast majority, it is too invisible, intangible, difficult to define, and difficult to realise, to serve as either a guide or a support. Yet some of those who are least able, coolly, logically, and consistently to understand and adhere to a principle in the abstract, are the most enthusiastic in advocating, the most vigorous in defending, and the most extravagant in extending to the most extreme limits, its reflection, or supposed reflection, in the person and behaviour of a friend; and they are apt, in their devotion to the friend, to forget the principle. It was thus in the case of Sir Everard Digby and Robert Catesby. In his friendship with Catesby, Sir Everard was eager to be one of the most pronounced champions of the Catholic religion, yet when Catesby acted in direct opposition to the fundamental principles of that religion, Sir Everard clung to the visible friend to the neglect of the invisible principle, which, theoretically, he held to be more precious than life itself.
When one idea takes too forcible possession of the mind, although the objections to it may collectively be overpowering, if taken one by one, it is easy to dispose of them, and then to blind the eyes, to stifle the conscience, and to imagine a glamour of righteousness, unselfishness, and heroism, in iniquity, self-pleasing, and even cruelty. Digby experienced this fatal facility. He did not at once consent to Catesby’s request without the least pretence of considering its merits; but he combatted the objections to it one by one, and thus easily defeated them. He endeavoured to regard the matter from Catesby’s point of view, and he found the process simple, if not agreeable.
And here let me say that I wish I could honestly represent Sir Everard as having consented hurriedly to the plot in a hot-headed love of adventure. The evidence, unfortunately, all points the other way. He was persuaded with great difficulty by Catesby. He disliked the look of the whole thing, and he finally consented to it after cool and deliberate reflection. I admit that he was impulsive; I do not deny that, in this instance, he may have acted on sudden impulse at particular stages of his lengthened agony of doubt and indecision, or that, after being too slow in obeying his first impulse to refuse to hear another word about the atrocious project, he may have yielded too hurriedly to his later impulse to throw in his lot with the friend whom he trusted; but I cannot excuse him on the ground that his adhesion to the conspiracy was the result of a momentary convulsion of enthusiastic folly.