“Will you come with us?”said he.
“Maybe we would, if we knew what you mean to do,”was the reply.
“We are for God and the country!”said Catesby.
Then one of the men, who was leaning with his back against a wall, struck the ground with his stick and cried, “We are for the King James, as well as for God and the country, and we will not go against his will.”
And now, with their arms, armour, gunpowder, and horses, which had been for the most part begged, borrowed, or stolen, the little party of filibusters started again, in a northerly direction, towards Holbeche House, Stephen Littleton’s place in Staffordshire. Although more soldierlike in appearance, owing to their armour—their want now was not of armour, but of men to wear it—they felt much less martial at heart than on leaving Dunchurch two days earlier. They were greatly discouraged at finding that no volunteers rallied to their ranks; that, when they rode up to the houses of any of the Catholic gentry, they were invariably driven with reproaches and ignominy from their doors as the greatest enemies of the Catholic cause, which they were told they had brought into disrepute by their misguided and iniquitous zeal.
[314]“Notwithstanding of their fair shews and pretence of their Catholick cause,”says Bishop Barlow, “no creature, man or woman, through all that countrey would once so much as give them willingly a cup of drink, or any sort of comfort or support, but with execrations detested them.”This not only chilled the hearts of the leaders, but also alarmed their followers, who saw them leaving one large Catholic house after another crestfallen in expression and without a single recruit in their train. To add to their depression, the roads were bad, and in many places deep with mud, and the weather was stormy and very wet.[315] Instead of increasing, as Sir Everard and his friends had hoped and expected, their numbers steadily diminished, and they were soon reduced to thirty-six or less.[316] Their men still further lagged behind and disappeared, and the leaders of the expedition threatened those who remained that the next man who attempted to desert should be instantly shot. When they rested, Sir Everard and his companions took it in turn to watch their men with a loaded pistol, determined to make an example of the first deserter they could get a shot at. When they rode on, they endeavoured to be equally vigilant; but with such a straggling, wearied, undisciplined cavalcade, in a wooded country like Worcestershire, on a dark and misty November afternoon, it was impossible to prevent men from sneaking away unperceived, and the desertions hourly continued.
Sir Everard’s spirits drooped more and more. “Not one man came to take our part, though we expected so many,”[317] he says. As to the common people in the villages and the small towns through which the irregular train passed, they merely stood and gazed at them without showing the least inclination to join them.
In the course of the day (Thursday, Nov. 7th), Sir Everard and his allies had a fresh cause of anxiety. On looking back, one of them descried a small body of horsemen in the distance. Filled with hope, thinking that it consisted of Catholics from the neighbourhood coming to join them, they halted, to enable the riders to come up, but, to their disappointment, the other party pulled up also. This was suspicious, and still more so when the mysterious group moved slowly after them on their starting again. Evidently the horsemen in their rear were watching their movements with no friendly intentions. To the conspirators, their distant but ever following figures must have produced sensations not unlike those caused to worn-out travellers by the appearance of vultures in the desert. So long as it was light, they kept catching occasional glimpses of them, and, worst of all, the band of “shadowers”was increasing in numbers and venturing nearer and nearer. The conspirators and their followers were not in actual flight; indeed, they professed to be recruiting for their “army”; but they were none the less steadily, if slowly, pursued by a body of horsemen exceeding their own in numbers, though not so well armed.
It would be difficult to imagine anything more wretched than the little band of conspirators as they wended their way through the Warwickshire, Worcestershire, and Staffordshire lanes and villages. Fagged and haggard were the men, on jaded and weary steeds, and their helmets, pikes, and pistols gave them an almost comical appearance of martial masquerade. The cart-loads of unused armour and weapons were terribly suggestive of failure, and the conspirators’ appeals to the able-bodied men, who stood gazing at them from the doors of wayside inns and from village cross-roads, were met either with insult, laughter, or stolid indifference.
To a man like Sir Everard Digby, who had been accustomed to meet with respect, honour, and deference wherever he went, all this must have been exceptionally galling, and it would be made the more bitter by his observing that several of his companions were passing through a part of the country where they were well known and once honoured. He had expected to be received with cheers and enthusiasm at every Catholic house on his route for his attempt to better the condition of his co-religionists, and to see squires, yeomen, and peasants either hurrying to horse and to arms, or imploring for a headpiece and a sword or halberd from the store in the waggons of the little train; and what did he find?—the door of every Catholic house shut against him, or only opened for an out-pouring of reproaches and repudiations; the Catholics, from the highest to the lowest, shaking their heads at him and bidding him begone; and his carts of arms, armour, and gunpowder eyed with anger, scorn, and derision. Instead of regarding him as the best friend of their cause, the Catholic squires treated him as if he were its worst enemy; and, as they turned their backs upon himself and his friends and his followers, they gave him to understand that they considered the “powder-action,”which he protested was intended for the relief of the professors of the ancient faith, one of the most madly-conceived, iniquitous, and prejudicial projects ever undertaken by people bearing the name of Christians.