Here Sir Everard Digby interrupted the great lawyer with the remark that he had not justified the fact, but had confessed that he deserved the vilest death; and that all he had done was to seek mercy, “and some moderation of justice.”
As to moderation of justice, replied the Attorney-General, how could a man expect or ask for it who had acted in direct opposition to all mercy and all justice? And had he not already had most ample and most undeserved moderation shown to him? Verily he ought “to admire the great moderation and mercy of the King, in that, for so exorbitant a crime, no new torture answerable thereunto was devised to be inflicted upon him.” Was it not sufficient consolation to him to reflect upon his good fortune in this respect? Sir Everard had talked about his wife and children. Well! did he forget how he had said “that for the Catholick Cause he was content to neglect the ruine of himself, his Wife, his Estate, and all”? Oh! he should be made content enough on this point. Here was an appropriate text for him:—“Let his Wife be a widow, and his Children vagabonds, let his posterity be destroyed, and in the next generation let his name be quite put out.” Then Sir Edward Coke spoke directly to Sir Everard, and said:—“For the paying of your Creditors, it is equal and just, but yet fit the King be first satisfied and paid, to whom you owe so much, as that all you have is too little: yet these things must be left to the pleasure of his Majesty, and the course of Justice and Law.” Fortunately for Sir Everard, “in respect for the time (for it grew now dark)” the Attorney General spoke “very briefly.”
One of the nine Commissioners, appointed to try the prisoners, now addressed Sir Everard. His words came with more force, perhaps it might be said with more cruel force, because he was himself a Catholic. This was Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk, and second son of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who had been beheaded on Tower Hill, nearly sixty years earlier, in the reign of Henry VIII. This Commissioner had espoused the cause of Mary, Queen of Scots,[398] and he was rather ostentatiously put forward at this trial, and afterwards at that of Father Garnet, to prove his loyalty and to counteract the jealousy and suspicion which had been caused by the appointment of a man of his religion[399] to the Wardenship of the Cinque Ports. Banks wrote of him,[400] “other authors represent him as the most contemptible and despicable of man-kind; a wretch, that it causes astonishment to reflect, that he was the son of the generous, the noble, and accomplished Earl of Surrey.[401] He was a learned man, but a pedant, dark and mysterious, and consequently far from possessing masterly abilities. He was the grossest of flatterers, &c.”
Northampton began his speech as follows:—
[402]“You must not hold it strange, Sir Everard Digby, though at this time being pressed in duty, Conscience and Truth, I do not suffer you to wander in the Laberinth of your own idle conceits without opposition, to seduce others, as your self have been seduced, by false Principles; or to convey your self by charms of imputation, by clouds of errour, and by shifts of lately devised ‘Equivocation’; out of that streight wherein your late secure and happy fortune hath been unluckily entangled; but yet justly surprised, by the rage and revenge of your own rash humors. If in this crime (more horrible than any man is able to express) I could lament the estate of any person upon earth, I could pity you, but thank your self and your bad counsellours, for leading you into a Crime of such a kind; as no less benummeth in all faithfull, true and honest men, the tenderness of affection, than it did in you, the sense of all humanity. That you were once well thought of, and esteemed by the late Queen, I can witness, having heard her speak of you with that grace which might have encouraged a true gentleman to have run a better course: Nay, I will add further, that there was a time, wherein you were as well affected to the king our master’s expectation, though perhaps upon false rumours and reports, that he would have yielded satisfaction to your unprobable and vast desires: but the seed that wanted moisture (as our Saviour Himself reporteth) took no deep root: that zeal which hath no other end or object than the pleasing of it self, is quickly spent: and Trajan, that worthy and wise Emperour, had reason to hold himself discharged of all debts to those, that had offended more by prevarication, than they could deserve by industry.”
The main contention of his long and wordy speech was to refute the charge of broken promises to his co-religionists brought by Sir Everard Digby in his description of his motives. It was well-known that the Catholics considered the king guilty of perfidy on this point, and that they based their accusation chiefly upon the reports of Father Watson’s celebrated interview with James in Scotland, a matter with which I dealt in an early chapter. Northampton denied that James had ever encouraged the Catholics to expect any favour.
He made a strong point of Percy’s having asserted that the king had promised toleration to the Catholics; asking why, if this were really the case, Percy, at the beginning of the king’s reign, thought it worth while to employ Guy Fawkes and others to plot against the king in Spain? He wound up by praying for Sir Everard’s repentance in this world and his forgiveness in the next.
Then Lord Salisbury spoke. He began by acknowledging his own connection, by marriage, with Sir Everard, and then he proceeded, with even greater zeal than Northampton, to imply that the prisoner’s plea of broken promises to Catholics would be understood to mean bad faith on the part of the king; and it was thought by some that Sir Everard would have had his sentence commuted for beheading, had it not been for what Salisbury now said.[403] After defending the king from all imputation of faithlessness towards his Catholic subjects, Salisbury referred to Sir Everard’s personal guilt, and dwelt upon Guy Fawkes’s evidence that, at Gothurst, he had [expressed] a fear lest the gunpowder stored beneath the houses of Parliament, might, during the wet weather in October, have “grown dank.”
When Salisbury had finished, Sergeant Philips got up and “prayed the judgment of the court upon the verdict of the Jury against the seven first prisoners, and against Sir Everard Digby upon his own confession.” Each prisoner was then formally asked what he had to say why judgment of death should not be pronounced against him. Finally Lord Chief Justice Popham described and defended the laws made by Queen Elizabeth against priests, recusants, and receivers and harbourers of priests,[404] which seems to have been a little wide of the subject of the crime of the prisoners, and then he solemnly pronounced the usual sentence for high treason upon all the eight men who stood convicted before him.
Then Sir Everard bowed towards the commissioners who had tried him and said:—“If I may but hear any of your Lordships say you forgive me, I shall go more cheerfully to the gallows.”