As to the plan of proceedings, when the explosion should have taken place with success, the great principle was to be to rally the Catholic gentry with their servants and retainers for a general rising in a central district. Gothurst was considered too far east for this purpose, and Warwickshire was selected as the base of operations for the volunteer Catholic army. It was true that that army did not yet exist; that the number of men at present initiated into the conspiracy was very small; and that the spirit in which the Catholics would receive the news of the wholesale massacre of the King and his Parliament remained to be proved; but Catesby and his confederates, Sir Everard apparently among the number, were very sanguine.
Catesby, the originator, organiser, and leader of the whole proceeding, was to have the management of the grand explosion and the conduct of matters in London immediately afterwards, while Digby was to have the charge of the rising in Warwickshire, where Catesby was to join him, as occasion might serve. As a nucleus of his hoped-for army, Sir Everard was to take so many of his retainers as he could muster, with a quantity of arms in carts, to Dunchurch, a place very near Rugby, and to invite a large number of his trustworthy friends, likely to join in the cause, to come there with their horses and servants for a great “hunting-match”on Dunsmoor Heath.
Country gentlemen in our own times have often wondered what this “hunting-match”could be. Possibly it may have been a coursing meeting. The foundation of the rules of coursing, in its modern sense, was the code drawn up by the Duke of Norfolk in the reign of Elizabeth,[218] and as Sir Everard had been a good deal at the Court of that Queen, and was devoted to field sports, it is not unreasonable to infer that the so-called “hunting-match” may have been ostensibly what we should call a coursing-meeting, with, perhaps, some hawking added. It was arranged that on the arrival of the guests invited to take part in it at Dunchurch, Sir Everard was to hint to them that a decisive blow of some sort was about to be struck in London, although they were not to be enlightened as to its nature until the news should arrive of its success. On the receipt of this news, Digby was at once to despatch a party to seize the Princess Elizabeth at the house of her governor, Lord Harington—he had been created Baron Harington of Exton in 1603—at his house near Coventry, and if Catesby should fail to secure the persons of the Prince of Wales or the Duke of York in the South, Digby was to proclaim her Queen. The little volunteer army in Warwickshire was then to seize the horses at Warwick Castle and the store of armour at Whewell Grange, Lord Windsor’s house in Worcestershire, “and by that time,”said Catesby, in unfolding his plan, “I hope some friends will come and take our parts.”[219]
Sir Everard was not going to leave his wife and children at Gothurst, between the great rallying centre of his expected army in Warwickshire and the possible opposing army which, in case of failure, might approach from London. On the contrary, he was anxious to place them on the further side of Warwickshire, so that the band of Catholic warriors might lie between them and the source of danger; at the same time he wished to have them within easy reach; and, for this purpose, he hired or borrowed from Mr Throckmorton, a house called Coughton (containing many “secret recesses”[220]), near Alcester, and about twenty-five miles from the primary rallying point at Dunchurch.
Sir Everard said in his examination in Nov. 1605, that he “did borrow a howse of Mr Thomas Throckmorton for one moneth, purposing to take it longer, or to enquire out some other if that were not to be had, if”his “wife should like to live there.”[221]
Being, in those days, a quadrangular house,[222] it could easily be defended in case of need. It is impossible that Sir Everard can have given Lady Digby the real reason for which he proposed to remove her there: the secret which he was keeping from her can scarcely have failed to cause some restraint between them, and it would be but natural that she should feel considerable uneasiness. Why, she would ask herself, should her husband, who had hitherto shared everything with her, now have something in hand which he was evidently concealing?
Another inmate at Gothurst was in a state of great anxiety, namely Father Garnet. The exertions to which his lay companion, “Little John,”was put, at his host’s request, to increase the secret passages and make a hidden room, may have aroused his suspicions still further; but, after all, Gothurst would be no more ramified with such places of concealment than certain other houses; for instance, at Hendlip Hall, about four miles from Worcester, a house to which Father Garnet was to go within two months, to spend several weeks, a house, moreover, of much the same date as Gothurst, there was[223] “scarcely an apartment that”had “not secret ways of going in or going out”; some had “back stair cases concealed in the walls; others”“places of retreat in their chimneys; some”“trap-doors, and all” presented “a picture of gloom, insecurity, and suspicion.” And well might the inmates of a Catholic family live in “gloom, insecurity, and suspicion,”in those days of pursuivants, fines, hangings, and quarterings.
Father Gerard, who was a frequent visitor at Gothurst, observed with surprise that Sir Everard had a far larger number of horses than he had been accustomed to keep;[224] but, when it occurred to him that this might be because he was, for some reason or other, better off than before, he found that, on the contrary, he had been selling his farm-stock, and even some land, which puzzled him much, particularly in so prudent and careful a man, and the more so since he was aware that Sir Everard was going to pay the fine required of recusants by the statute, and was therefore in no danger of having his stock taken from him compulsorily.
Although Sir Everard Digby had been led by Catesby to believe that some of the Jesuit Fathers had given their approval to the Gunpowder Plot, and had special reasons, as we have seen, for imagining Father Garnet to be one of these, he does not appear to have thought that Father Gerard knew anything about the matter, or would have consented to it if he had known of it: for, on his arraignment, he declared that Father Gerard was ignorant of it, and that he had never mentioned it to him, [225]“alleging the reason,”“because, he said, he feared lest” that Father “should dissuade him from it.”So here we find him acting in opposition to his greatest friend—his “brother,”as he called him—the priest who had received him into the Church, and was his chief spiritual adviser. A good Catholic might lawfully act in opposition to the opinion of his confessor or director in matters open to difference of view, especially when that opinion was only suspected, and had not been delivered; but on such an all-important question as this, he might have been expected to consult Gerard, although it must be remembered that he had been assured by Catesby that another Jesuit had approved of the plot.
There is one consideration on this subject which is of the highest importance, namely, that Garnet was the Provincial, that is to say the superior and the very highest authority among the Jesuits in England, at that time, and therefore the Jesuit of all others most in communication with Rome, and most likely to know the mind of the General of his Order as well as that of the Holy Father himself.