It is unfortunate that there should be men of the Digby class as well as the Catesby! A priestly judgment has to be given in a court in which the inquirer is witness for both plaintiff and defendant, as well as advocate for both plaintiff and defendant. The friend, therefore, of the inquirer, who is asked to accept the decision which he brings from that spiritual court, ought not to do so unless he feels assured either that he would lay his case with absolute impartiality before that tribunal, or that the judge would discredit his evidence if given with partiality. Now, knowing Catesby very intimately, had Sir Everard Digby good reasons for believing that he could be trusted as an absolutely impartial witness and an absolutely impartial advocate on both sides? or else that the priest consulted would certainly detect any flaw in the evidence of a man so notorious for his plausibility and his powers of persuasion? If not, and he was determined only to join in the enterprise on the condition that it had priestly consent, he was bound either to go and ask it for himself, or, if his oath of secrecy prevented this, to refuse to have anything further to do with the conspiracy. So far as I have been able to ascertain of the previous history of Robert Catesby, he was one of the very last men from whom I should have felt inclined to take spiritual advice or spiritual consent at second hand; and, on this point, I find it difficult to exculpate Sir Everard Digby, although the difficulty is somewhat qualified by an unhappy remark made to Sir Everard by Father Garnet, to be noticed presently.
But first let us notice an incident which, in the case of two men professing to be practical Catholics, is nothing short of astounding! As a modern Jesuit, the present editor of The Month, the chief Jesuit journal in this country, points out,[170] Catesby “peremptorily demanded of”his associates in the conspiracy, of whom Sir Everard Digby was one, “a promise that they would not mention the project even in confession, lest their ghostly fathers should discountenance and hinder it.”Considering that that project, even when regarded in the most favourable light, was one likely to entail very intricate questions of conscience in the course of its preparation and its fulfilment, it is inconceivable how men called, or calling themselves, good Catholics could either make such a demand or consent to it.
FOOTNOTES:
[159] “Letters of Sir Everard Digby”in Gunpowder Treason, p. 177.
[160] Speech at his trial.
[161] Gunpowder Treason, by Thomas, Bishop of Lincoln, p. 55.
[162] Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, p. 65 seq.
[163] Hatfield MS., 110, 30. Father Garnet and the Gunpowder Plot, p. 7.
[164] Records, S. J., Vol. iv., p. 108.
[165] History of the Gunpowder Plot, Jardine, Appendix, p. 329.