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SIR EVERARD DIGBY
From a portrait belonging to W. R. M. Wynne, Esq. of Peniarth, Merioneth

THE LIFE OF
A CONSPIRATOR

BEING A BIOGRAPHY OF SIR EVERARD DIGBY
BY
ONE OF HIS DESCENDANTS

BY THE AUTHOR OF
“A LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP LAUD,”BY A ROMISH RECUSANT, “THE
LIFE OF A PRIG, BY ONE,”ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO., Ltd.
PATERNOSTER HOUSE, CHARING CROSS ROAD
1895

PREFACE

The chief difficulty in writing a life of Sir Everard Digby is to steer clear of the alternate dangers of perverting it into a mere history of the Gunpowder Plot, on the one hand, and of failing to say enough of that great conspiracy to illustrate his conduct, on the other. Again, in dealing with that plot, to condemn all concerned in it may seem like kicking a dead dog to Protestants, and to Catholics like joining in one of the bitterest and most irritating taunts to which they have been exposed in this country throughout the last three centuries. Nevertheless, I am not discouraged. The Gunpowder Plot is an historical event about which the last word has not yet been said, nor is likely to be said for some time to come; and monographs of men who were, either directly or indirectly, concerned in it, may not be altogether useless to those who desire to make a study of it. However faulty the following pages may be in fact or in inference, they will not have been written in vain if they have the effect of eliciting from others that which all students of historical subjects ought most to desire—the Truth.

I wish to acknowledge most valuable assistance received from the Right Rev. Edmund Knight, formerly Bishop of Shrewsbury, as well as from the Rev. John Hungerford Pollen, S.J., who was untiring in his replies to my questions on some very difficult points; but it is only fair to both of them to say that the inferences they draw from the facts, which I have brought forward, occasionally vary from my own. My thanks are also due to that most able, most courteous, and most patient of editors, Mr Kegan Paul, to say nothing of his services in the very different capacity of a publisher, to Mr Wynne of Peniarth, for permission to photograph his portrait of Sir Everard Digby, and to Mr Walter Carlile for information concerning Gayhurst.

The names of the authorities of which I have made most use are given in my footnotes; but I am perhaps most indebted to one whose name does not appear the oftenest. The back-bone of every work dealing with the times of the Stuarts must necessarily be the magnificent history of Mr Samuel Rawson Gardiner.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.

Nothing is so fatal to the telling of an anecdote as the prelude:—“I once heard an amusing story,”&c., and it would be almost as unwise to begin a biography by stating that its subject was a very interesting character. On the other hand, perhaps I may frighten away readers by telling them at starting, this simple truth, that I am about to write the history of a young man of great promise, whose short life proved a miserable failure, who terribly injured the cause he had most at heart, for which he gave his life, a man of whom even his enemies said, when he had met his sad fate:—“Poor fellow. He deserved it. But what a pity!”

If the steady and unflinching gaze of one human being upon another can produce the hypnotic state, it may be that, in a much lesser degree, there is some subtle influence in the eternal stare of the portrait of an ancestor. There is no getting away from it unless you leave the room. If you look at your food, talk to a friend, or read a book, you know and feel that his eyes are still rivetted upon you; and if you raise your own, again, towards his, there he is, gravely and deliberately gazing at you, or, you are half inclined to think, through you at something beyond and behind you, until you almost wish that you could be thrown into some sort of cataleptic condition, in which a series of scenes could be brought before your vision from the history of the long-dead man, whose representation seems only to exist for the purpose of staring you out of countenance.

In a large country house, near the west coast of Wales, and celebrated for its fine library, hangs a full-length portrait which might well impel such a desire. It represents a tall man, with long hair and a pointed beard, in a richly-chased doublet, a lace ruff and cuffs, very short and fringed trunk hose, and a sword by his side. He has a high forehead, rather raised and arched eyebrows, a long nose, hollow cheeks, and a narrow, pointed chin. His legs are thin; his left hand is placed upon his hip; and with his right he holds a cane, which is resting on the ground. At the bottom of the picture is painted, in Roman characters, “Sir Everard Digby, Knight, OB. 1606.”

Few people care for genealogies unless their own names are recorded in them. The keenest amateur herald in matters relating to his own family, will exhibit an amazing apathy when the pedigree of another person is offered for his inspection; the shorter, therefore, my notice of Sir Everard Digby’s descent, the better. He was descended from a distinguished family. It had come over from Normandy with William the Conqueror, who had granted it lands at Tilton, which certainly were in its possession in the sixteenth century, though whether the subject of my biography inherited them, I am not quite sure. The first Sir Everard Digby lived in the reigns of Henry I. and Stephen.[1] This powerful family sided with Henry VII. against Richard III.; and on one occasion, King Henry VII.[2] “did make Knights in the field seven brothers of his house at one time, from whom descended divers houses of that name, which live all in good reputation in their several countries. But this Sir Everard Digby was the heir of the eldest and chiefest house, and one of the chiefest men in Rutlandshire, where he dwelt, as his ancestors had done before him, though he had also much living in Leicestershire and other shires adjoining.”He was the fourteenth in direct eldest male descent from Almar, the founder of the family in the eleventh century. Five of his forefathers had borne the name of Everard Digby, one of whom was killed at the battle of Towton in 1461. Sir Everard’s father had also been an Everard, and done honour to the name; but literature and not war had been the field in which he had succeeded. He published four books.[3] The only one of these in my possession is his Dissuasive from taking the Goods and Livings of the Church. It is dedicated “To the Right Honourable Sir Christopher Hatton, Lord High Chancellor of England, &c.”

The author’s style may be inferred from the opening of his preface:—“If my pen (gentle reader) had erst bin dipped in the silver streames flowing from Parnassus Hill, or that Apollo with his sweet-sounding harp would vouchsafe to direct the passage thereof unto the top of the high Olympus; after so general a view of great varietie far and neere, I might bouldly begin with that most excellent Poet Cicelides Musę paulo maiora canamus.”I leave my readers to judge how many modern publishers would read any further, if such a book were offered to them in these days! Still, it is interesting as showing the style of the times.

Father Gerard, an intimate friend of the Sir Everard Digby whose life I am writing, mentions[4] “the piety of his parents,”and that “they were ever the most noted and known Catholics in that country” (Rutlandshire); and Mr Gillow, in his Bibliographical Dictionary of English Catholics[5], states that they “had ever been the most staunch and noted Catholics in the county of Rutland.”But here I am met with a difficulty. Would a Catholic have written such a passage as the following, which I take from the Dissuasive? It refers to that great champion of Protestantism and Anglicanism, Queen Elizabeth.

“I cannot but write truely,”he says, “that which the Clergie with the whole realme confesse plainely: That we render immortell thankes unto Almightie God, for preserving her most Roiall Majestie so miraculouslie unto this daie, giving her a most religious heart (the mirror of all Christian princes) once and ever wholly consecrated to the maintaining of his divine worship in his holy Temple. From this cleare Christall fountaine of heavenlie vertue, manie silver streames derive their sundrie passages so happelie into the vineyarde of the Lorde, that neither the flaming fury of outward enimies, nor the scorching sacrilegious zeale of domesticall dissimulation, can drie up anie one roote planted in the same, since the peaceable reigne of her most Roial Majestie.”

The writer of the notice of Sir Everard Digby in the Biographia Britannica[6] appears to have believed his father to have been a Protestant; but on what grounds he does not state. So familiar a friend as Father Gerard is unlikely to have been mistaken on this point. Possibly, however, in speaking of his “parents,”he may have meant his forefathers rather than his own father and mother. This seems the more likely because, after his father’s death, when he was eleven years old, Sir Everard was brought up a Protestant. In those times wards were often, if not usually, educated as Protestants, even if their fathers had been Catholics; but if Sir Everard’s mother had been remarkable for her “piety”as a Catholic, and one of the “noted and known Catholics”in her county, we might expect to find some record of her having endeavoured to induce her son to return to the faith of his father, as she lived until after his death. The article in the Biographia states that Sir Everard was “educated with great care, but under the tuition of some Popish priests”: Father Gerard, on the contrary, says that he “was not brought up Catholicly in his youth, but at the University by his guardians, as other young gentlemen used to be”; and in his own Life,[7] he speaks of him as a Protestant after his marriage. Lingard also says[8] that “at an early age he was left by his father a ward of the crown, and had in consequence been educated in the Protestant faith.” I can see no reason for doubting that this was the case.

At a very early age, Everard Digby was taken to the Court of Queen Elizabeth, where he became “a pensioner,”[9] or some sort of equivalent to what is now termed a Queen’s page. He must have arrived at the Court about the time that Essex was in the zenith of his career; he may have witnessed his disgrace and Elizabeth’s misery and vacillation with regard to his trial and punishment. He would be in the midst of the troubles at the Court, produced by the rivalry between Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Charles Blount; he would see his relative, Cecil, rapidly coming into power; he could scarcely fail to hear the many speculations as to the successor of his royal mistress.

He may have accompanied her[10] “hunting and disporting”“every other day,”and seen her “set upon jollity”; he may have enjoyed the[11] “frolyke”in “courte, much dauncing in the privi chamber of countrey daunces befor the Q. M.”; very likely he may have been in attendance upon the Queen when she walked on[12] “Richmond Greene,”“with greater shewes of ability, than”could “well stand with her years.”During the six years that he was at Court, he probably came in for a period of brilliancy and a period of depression, although there is nothing to show for certain whether he had retired before the time thus described in an old letter[13]:—“Thother of the counsayle or nobilitye estrainge themselves from court by all occasions, so as, besides the master of the horse, vice-chamberlain, and comptroller, few of account appeare there.”If Lingard is right, however,[14] he gave up his appointment at Court the year before Elizabeth’s death, and thus luckily escaped the time when, as he describes her, she was[15] “reduced to a skeleton. Her food was nothing but manchet bread and succory pottage. Her taste for dress was gone. She had not changed her clothes for many days. Nothing could please her; she was the torment of the ladies who waited on her person. She stamped with her feet, and swore violently at the objects of her anger.”

One thing that may have had a subsequent influence upon Digby, while he was at the Court of Elizabeth, was the violence shown towards Catholics. In the course of the fourteen years that followed the defeat of the Spanish Armada before the death of the Queen,[16] “the Catholics groaned under the presence of incessant persecution. Sixty-one clergymen, forty-seven laymen, and two gentlemen, suffered capital punishment for some or other of the spiritual felonies and treasons which had been lately created.”Although he had been brought up a Protestant, “this gentleman,”says Gerard,[17] “was always Catholicly affected,”and the severe measures dealt out to Catholics whilst he was at Court may have disgusted him and induced him to leave it.

I have shown how Father Gerard states[18] that Sir Everard Digby was educated “at the University by his guardians, as other young gentlemen used to be.” It is to be wished that he had informed us at what University and at what College; when he went there and when he left; as his attendance at Court, together with a very important event, to be noticed presently, which took place, or is said to have taken place, when he was fifteen, make it difficult to allot a vacant time for his University career.

The young man,—he did not live to be twenty-five,—whose portrait we have been looking at, is described in the Biographia Britannica[19] as having been “remarkably handsome,”“extremely modest and affable,” and “justly reputed one of the finest gentlemen in England.”His great personal friend, the already-quoted Father Gerard,[20] says that he was “as complete a man in all things that deserved estimation, or might win him affection, as one should see in a kingdom. He was of stature about two yards high,”“of countenance” “comely and manlike.”“He was skilful in all things that belonged to a gentleman, very cunning at his weapon, much practised and expert in riding of great horses, of which he kept divers in his stable with a skilful rider for them. For other sports of hunting or hawking, which gentlemen in England so much use and delight in, he had the best of both kinds in the country round about.”“For all manner of games which are also usual for gentlemen in foul weather, when they are forced to keep house, he was not only able therein to keep company with the best, but was so cunning in them all, that those who knew him well, had rather take his part than be against him.”“He was a good musician, and kept divers good musicians in his house; and himself also could play well of divers instruments. But those who were well acquainted with him”—and no one knew him better than Father Gerard himself—“do affirm that in gifts of mind he excelled much more than in his natural parts; although in those also it were hard to find so many in one man in such a measure. But of wisdom he had an extraordinary talent, such a judicial wit and so well able to discern and discourse of any matter, as truly I have heard many say they have not seen the like of a young man, and that his carriage and manner of discourse were more like to a grave Councillor of State than to a gallant of the Court as he was, and a man of about twenty-six years old (which I think was his age, or thereabouts).”In this Father Gerard was mistaken. Sir Everard Digby did not live to be twenty-six, or even twenty-five. Gerard continues:—“And though his behaviour were courteous to all, and offensive to none, yet was he a man of great courage and of noted valour.”

GOTHURST
The home of Sir Everard Digby; now called Gayhurst

We began by examining a portrait: let us now take a look at an old country-house. Turning our backs on Wales, a country which has little to do with my subject, we will imagine ourselves in Buckinghamshire, about half way between the towns of Buckingham and Bedford, and about three miles from Newport Pagnell, a little way from the high road leading in a north-westerly direction. There stands the now old, but at the time of which I am writing, the comparatively new house, known then as Gothurst.

Perhaps one of the chief attractions in Elizabethan architecture is that, by combining certain features of both classical and gothic architecture, it is a result, as well as an example, of that spirit of compromise so dear to the English nation. If somewhat less picturesque, and less rich and varied in colour, than the half-timbered houses of Elizabethan architecture, the stone buildings of the same style are more massive and stately in their appearance, and the newly-hewn stone of Gothurst[21] presented a remarkably fine front, with its pillared porch, its lengthy series of mullioned windows, and its solid wings at either side. It was built upon rising ground, which declined gradually to the rich, if occasionally marshy, meadows bordering on the river Ouse.[22] It was a large house, although, like many others built in the same style, the rooms were rather low in proportion to their size.[23] The approach was through a massive gateway,[24] from which an avenue of yews—which had existed in the time of the older house that formerly stood on the same site—led up to the square space in front of the door. Near the gateway was the old church, which was then in a very indifferent state of repair,[25] and below this were three pieces of water. Beyond them ran the river Ouse, and on the opposite side stood the old tower and church of Tyringham. If the house was new, it was very far from being the pretentious erection of a newly-landed proprietor. Yet the estate on which it stood had more than once been connected with a new name, owing to failures in the male line of its owners and the marriages of its heiresses, since it had been held by a De Nouers, under the Earl of Kent, half-brother to William the Conqueror. It had passed[26] by marriage to the De Nevylls in 1408; it had passed in the same way to the Mulshos in the reign of Henry VIII., and I am about to show that, at the end of the sixteenth century, it passed again into another family through the wedding of its heiress.

Mary Mulsho, the sole heiress of Gothurst, was a girl of considerable character, grace, and gravity of mind, and she was well suited to become the bride of the young courtier, musician, and sportsman excelling “in gifts of mind,”described at the beginning of this chapter. It can have been no marriage for the sake of money or lands; for Everard Digby was already a rich man, possessed of several estates, and he had had a long minority; moreover, there is plenty of evidence to show that they were devotedly attached to one another.

The exact date of their marriage I am unable to give. Jardine says[27] that Sir Everard “was born in 1581,”and that “in the year 1596 he married”; and, if this was so, he can have been only fifteen on his marriage. Certainly he was very young at the time, and Jardine may be right; for, at the age of twenty-four, he said that a certain event, which is known to have taken place some time after their marriage, had happened seven or eight years earlier than the time at which he was speaking.[28] I have made inquiries in local registers and at the Herald’s College, without obtaining any further light upon the question of the exact date of his wedding. One thing is certain, that his eldest son, Kenelm, was born in the year 1603. In that same year Everard Digby was knighted by the new king, James I. He may have been young to receive that dignity; but, as a contemporary writer[29] puts it, “at this time the honour of knighthood, which antiquity preserved sacred, as the cheapest and readiest jewel to preserve virtue with, was promiscuously laid on any head belonging to the yeomandry (made addle through pride and contempt of their ancestors’ pedigree), that had but a court-friend, or money to purchase the favour of the meanest able to bring him into an outward room, when the king, the fountain of honour, came down, and was uninterrupted by other business; in which case it was then usual for the chamberlain or some other lord to do it.”It is said that, during the first three months of the reign of James I., the honour of knighthood was conferred upon seven hundred individuals.[30]

We find Sir Everard and Lady Digby, at this period of our story, possessed of everything likely to insure happiness—mutual affection, youth, intelligence, ability, popularity, high position, favour at Court, abundance of wealth, and a son and heir. How far this brilliant promise of happiness was fulfilled will be seen by and bye.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Harleian MSS., 1364.

[2] Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, Father Gerard, p. 87.

N.B.—“The Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot,”and “The Life of Father John Gerard,”are both published in one volume, entitled The Condition of Catholics under James I., edited by Father John Morris, S.J.: Longmans, Green & Co., 1871. It will be to this edition that I shall refer, when I quote from either of these two works.

[3] See Bibliographia Britannica, Vol. iii. p. 1697. The books were:—I. Theoria Analytica ad Monarchiam Scientiarum demonstrans. II. De Duplici Methodo, libri duo, Rami Methodum refutantes. III. De Arte Natandi; libri duo. IV. A Dissuasive from taking the Goods and Livings of the Church, &c.

[4] Narrative of the G. P., p. 88.

[5] P. 62.

[6] Vol. iii. p. 1697.

[7] Life of Father John Gerard, p. clii.

[8] History of England, Vol. vii. chap. i.

[9] S. P. James I., Gun. P. Book, Part II. No. 135, Exam, of Sir E. Digby—“He confesseth that he was a pencon to Quene Elizabeth about six yeres, and tooke the othe belonging to the place of a pencioner and no other.”

[10] Lord Henry Howard to Worcester.

[11] Letter of Lord Worcester, Lodge III. p. 148.

[12] MS. Letter. See Lingard, Vol. vi. chap. ix.

[13] MS. Letter. See Lingard, Vol. vi. chap. ix.

[14] History, Vol. vii. chap. i.

[15] Ib., Vol. vi. chap. ix.

[16] Lingard, Vol. vi. chap. iii.

[17] Narrative of the G. P., p. 88.

[18] Ib.

[19] Vol. iii. p. 180.

[20] Narrative of the G. P., p. 88.

[21] “Antiently Gaythurst,”says Pennant in his Journey. It is now called Gayhurst.

[22] See Pennant’s Journey from Chester to London, p. 437, seq. Also Lipscomb’s History and Antiquities of Bucks, Vol. iv. 158, seq.

[23] The house is still standing, and is the residence of Mr Carlile. The further side was enlarged, either in the eighteenth or very early in the nineteenth century, in the style of Queen Anne; but this in no way spoils the effect of the remarkably fine old Elizabethan front.

[24] This has disappeared.

[25] Poem on Everard Digby, written by the present owner of Gothurst, and privately printed.

[26] See Pennant’s Journey, p. 438.

[27] Criminal Trials, Vol. ii. p. 30.

[28] S. P. Dom. James I., Gunpowder Plot Book, Part II. No 135, B.

[29] Osborne’s Traditional Memorials, p. 468. I quote from a footnote on page 147 of the Somers Tracts, Vol. ii.

[30] See Lingard, Vol. vii. chap. i.

CHAPTER II.

Young as he was, Sir Everard Digby’s acquaintance was large and varied, and Gothurst was a very hospitable house. Its host’s tastes enabled him thoroughly to enjoy the society of his ordinary country neighbours, whose thoughts chiefly lay in the direction of sports and agriculture; but he still more delighted in conversing with literary and contemplative men, and when his guests combined all these qualities, he was happiest. One such, who frequently stayed at Gothurst, is thus quaintly described by Father Gerard.[31] Roger Lee “was a gentleman of high family, and of so noble a character and such winning manners that he was a universal favourite, especially with the nobility, in whose company he constantly was, being greatly given to hunting, hawking, and all other noble sports. He was, indeed, excellent at everything, &c.”In short, he appears to have been exactly the kind of man to make a congenial companion for Sir Everard.[32]

So intimate was he at Gothurst, even during the life of Lady Digby’s father, who had died at the time of which I am about to write, that, on his visits there, he frequently took with him a friend, who, like himself, was an intelligent, highly-educated, and agreeable man, of good family, fond of hawking, hunting, and other sports, and an excellent card-player.

Both Lee and his companion were Catholics, and, as I explained in the last chapter, Sir Everard Digby, although brought up a Protestant, was “Catholickly inclined, and entertained no prejudice whatever against those of the ancient faith”; indeed, in one of his conversations with Lee he went so far as to ask him whether he thought his friend would be a good match for his own sister, observing that he would have no objection to her marrying a Catholic; “for he looked on Catholics as good and honourable men.” Considering the pains, penalties, and disabilities to which recusants, as they were called, were then exposed, this meant very much more than a similar remark would mean in our times. And not only was he unprejudiced, for he took a keen interest in the religion of Catholics, and the three men talked frequently on that subject, the speakers being usually Lee and Digby, the friend putting in a word occasionally, but for the most part preferring to stand by as a listener.

None of Lady Digby’s family were Catholics;[33] her father had been an ardent Protestant, and possibly, as is not uncommonly the case, the long conversations about Catholicism would have more interest to one who had been brought up in an extreme Protestant atmosphere, than to those who had been accustomed to mix among people of both religions. At any rate, it is pretty evident that the young wife often sat by while her husband and his guests talked theology, and that she had gradually begun to form her own ideas upon the subject.

In considering life at a hospitable country house, nearly three hundred years ago, it is well to try to realise the difference between the conditions under which guests can now be obtained and those then existing. Visitors, and letters to invite them, are now conveyed by railway, and our postal arrangements are admirable; then, the public posts were very slow and irregular, many of the roads were what we should call mere cart-tracks, and it took weeks to perform journeys which can now be accomplished in twenty-four hours.

Our present system of filling our country houses just when we please, and then taking a quiet time alone, or visiting at other country houses, or betaking ourselves to some place for amusement, was impossible early in the seventeenth century; at that period, the only chance of seeing friends, except those living close at hand, was to receive them whenever they found it convenient to come, and to make country houses, as it were, hotels for such acquaintances who chanced to be passing near them on their journeys. People who were on visiting terms not uncommonly rode or drove up to each other’s houses, without special invitation; and, even when invited, if the distance were great, owing to the condition of the roads and the frequent breakdowns in the lumbersome vehicles, it rarely could be foreseen when a destination would be reached. Yet a welcome was generally pretty certain, for, before the days of newspapers, to say nothing of circulating libraries, hosts and hostesses were not hypercritical of the guests who might come to relieve their dulness, and the vestiges still remaining of the feudal hospitality of the baron’s great halls made them somewhat liberal and unfastidious as to the social standing of those whom they received; nor was it very rare for unknown travellers, who asked leave to take a short rest at a strange house, to meet with a cordial welcome and liberal entertainment.

There was nothing out of the common, therefore, in guests so well known at Gothurst as Roger Lee and his favourite companion riding up to that house unexpected, yet certain of being gladly received; but, on a certain occasion, they were both disappointed on reaching its arched and pillared doorway, at being told that their host had gone to London. The kind and graceful reception given by their hostess, however, did much to make up for his absence.

The long, if rather low rooms, with their wide, mullioned windows, the good supply, for those times, of books, and the picturesque grounds, with the river flowing through them, made Gothurst a charming house to stay at, and Sir Everard’s man-cook[34] no doubt made the creature comforts all that could be desired. For those who cared for sport, there was plenty of agreeable occupation, for there were hawks and hounds and well-filled stables. The young hostess, who had been brought up among men who spent their lives in country amusements, could converse about horses, dogs, and hunting if required; most probably, too, she often carried a hawk on her wrist; and, as she shared her husband’s tastes for literature and serious reflection, she could suit herself to almost any company.

Her two guests were prepared to talk about any topic that might seem most pleasing to their hostess, and it was soon clear that she wished to renew the conversations about religion which she had listened to with so much attention when her friends had been last in her house in the company of her husband. They were no less ready to discuss the same subject with her, and the more she listened to them, the more she questioned them, and the more she thought over their replies to her difficulties, doubts, and objections, the more inclination did she feel towards the creed they professed. She was well aware that her husband, at the very least, had a high respect for it; that he already admitted the truth of a great part of it, and that, in discussing it with Lee and his friend, he had propounded arguments against it rather as those of others than as his own; and when, after considerable solitary reflection while her visitors were out of doors, she felt very nearly assured that the Almighty could not approve of people professing a variety of creeds; that of several religions, all teaching different doctrines, only one could be right; that if God had revealed a right religion, he must have ordained some one body of men to teach it, and that there was only one body which seemed to have any claim to such tremendous authority, and that the Roman Catholic Church. These thoughts made her earnestly wish to talk the matter over with one of its priests, and consult him on the question of her own position in respect to so all-important a subject.

To meet with a priest was not easy in those times. Such priests as there were in England rarely, if ever, declared themselves, except to Catholics or would-be Catholics; for to make such a declaration, in this country, amounted to self-accusation of the crime of High Treason. Her two guests were Catholics, and would undoubtedly know several priests, and where they could be found; but to reveal their names or their whereabouts would be dangerous, both to those priests and to themselves, and Lady Digby felt some hesitation in interrogating them on such points. At last, rather than place one of her husband’s favourite companions in a position which might be unwelcome or even compromising, she determined to consult, not Roger Lee, but the friend he had brought with him. When she had delicately and nervously told him of her wish to see a priest, she was far from reassured by observing that he was with difficulty repressing a smile.[35] Could it be that he thought her a silly woman, hurriedly contemplating a change of religion on too scanty consideration? Or was the finding of a priest so difficult a thing just then as to make a wish to attempt it absurd? His expression, however, soon changed, and he told her, gravely enough, that he thought her desire might very possibly be fulfilled; at any rate, he promised to speak to Roger Lee about it. “In the meantime,”he added, “I can teach you the way to examine your conscience, as I myself was taught to do it by an experienced priest.”She was inclined to smile, in her turn, at such an offer from a mere sportsman; so, thanking him, she allowed the subject to drop.

He had not left her very long before Roger Lee entered the room, and, as he immediately told her that he had heard of her wish to have some conversation with a priest, it was clear that his friend had lost no time in informing him of it. Her surprise may be imagined when Lee proceeded to tell her that his companion was himself a priest!

At first she refused to believe it.[36] “How is it possible he can be a priest?”she asked, “has he not lived rather as a courtier? Has he not played cards with my husband, and played well too, which is impossible for those not accustomed to the game? Has he not gone out hunting, and frequently in my hearing spoken of the hunt, and of hawks in proper terms, without tripping, which no one could but one who has been trained to it?”

She gave many other reasons for disbelieving that he could be a cleric; and, finally, only accepted the fact on Roger Lee’s reiterated and solemn assurances.

“I pray you,”she then said, “not to be angry with me, if I ask further whether any other Catholic knows him to be a priest but you. Does ... know him?”

“Yes,”replied Lee, “and goes to confession to him.”

Then she asked the same question concerning several other Catholics living in the county, or the adjoining counties—among others, a lady who lived about ten miles from Gothurst.

“Why,”said Lee, “she not only knows him as a priest, but has given herself, and all her household, and all that she has, to be directed by him, and takes no other guide but him.”

At this, she admitted that she was thoroughly satisfied. Whereupon Lee remarked of his friend—

“You will find him, however, quite a different man when he has put off his present character.”

“This,”wrote the priest himself, who was Father John Gerard, second son of[37] Sir Thomas Gerard,[38] a Lancashire Knight, and an ancestor of the present Lord Gerard. “This she acknowledged the next day, when she saw me in my soutane and other priestly garments, such as she had never before seen. She made a most careful confession, and came to have so great an opinion of my poor powers, that she gave herself entirely to my direction, meditated great things, which, indeed, she carried out, and carries out still.”

I can fancy certain people, on reading all this, saying, “How very underhand!”I would ask them to bear in mind that for Father Gerard to have acted otherwise, and to have gone about in “priestly garments,”under his own name, would have been the same thing as to have gone to the common hangman and to have asked him to be so obliging as to put the noose round his neck, and then to cut him down as quickly as possible in order that he might relish to the full the ghastly operation of disembowelling and quartering. To this it may be replied that to conceal his identity might be all very well, but that it was quite another thing to stay at the house of a friend under that concealment, and, in the character of a layman and a guest, to decoy his host’s wife from her husband’s religion, in that host’s and husband’s absence, thus betraying his friendship and violating his hospitality.

My counter-reply would be, that his host had frequently discussed religious questions with both himself and Lee, and had shown, at least, a very friendly feeling towards Catholics in general and their religion; that, as has already been proved, he had in so many words declared himself free from any objection to the marriage of his own sister with a Catholic; nay, that he wished to see her[39] “married well, and to a Catholic, for he looked on Catholics as honourable men;”and that Lady Digby had determined to become a Catholic after due consideration and without any unfair external influence. As to his revealing his priestly character to her and exercising his priestly functions on her behalf, it must be observed that she had expressed a particular wish to see and to converse with a priest, without any such action on her part having been suggested to her by either Gerard or Lee, and that, if Gerard had continued to conceal his own priesthood, she would have simply been put to the trouble, and possibly the dangers, of searching for some other priest. If it be further objected that he ought at least to have waited until her husband’s return, I must so far repeat myself as to point out that a man who had stated that he would have no objection whatever to his sister’s being married to a Catholic, might be fairly assumed to have no objection to finding himself also married to a Catholic. Again, since Lady Digby was convinced that her soul would only be safe when in the fold of the Church, it would be natural that she should not like to admit of any delay in her reception into it. This being the case, the guests had their duties to their hostess, as well as to their host. It is unnecessary to enter here into the question whether wives should inform their husbands, and grown-up sons and daughters their parents, before joining the Roman Catholic Church; I may, however, be allowed to say that I believe it to be the usual opinion of priests, as well as laymen, as it certainly is of myself, that in most cases, although possibly not absolutely in every case, their doing so is not only desirable, but a duty, provided no hindrance to the following of the dictates of their consciences will result from so doing. Where it would have such an effect, our Lord’s teaching is plain and unmistakeable—“He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me.”

Some Protestants are under the impression that a conversion like Lady Digby’s, in which she consulted, and was received into the Church by, a “priest in disguise”is “just the sort of thing that Roman Catholics like.”There could be no greater mistake! It is just what they do not like. The secrecy of priests in the reign of James I. was rendered necessary by persecution: so was that of the laity in housing and entertaining them: so also were the precautions to conceal the fact that mass was said in private houses, and that rooms were used as chapels.

Now I would not pretend for a moment that such a condition of things was wholesome for either priests, Jesuits, laymen, or laywomen. There are occasions on which secrecy may be a dire necessity, but it is, at best, a necessary evil, and its atmosphere is unnatural, cramping, dangerous, and demoralising, although the persecution producing it may lead to virtue, heroism, and even martyrdom. The persecutions of the early Christians by the Romans gave the Church hundreds of saints and martyrs; yet surely those persecutions did not directly tend to the welfare of Christianity; and I suppose that the authorities of the established Church in this country would scarcely consider that Anglicanism would be in a more wholesome condition if every diocese and cure were to be occupied by a bishop or priest of the Church of Rome under the authority of the Pope, although the privations of the dispossessed Anglican clergy, and the inconveniences of the Anglican laity, might be the means of bringing about many individual instances of laudable self-denial, personal piety, and religious zeal. On the same principle, I think that a Catholic student, with an elementary knowledge of the subject, when approaching the history of his co-religionists in England during the reign of James I., would have good grounds for expecting that, while many cases of valiant martyrdom and suffering for the faith would embellish the pages he was about to read, those pages would also reveal that the impossibility of priests and religious living a clerical life, and the necessity of their joining day by day in the pursuits and amusements of laymen—laymen, often, of gaiety and fashion, if nothing more—had led to serious irregularities in discipline; that the frequent intervals without mass, or any other religious service or priestly assistance, had had the effect of rendering the laity deficient in the virtues which religious exercises and sacraments are supposed to inculcate; that the constant and inevitable practice of secrecy and concealment had induced a habit of mind savouring of prevarication, if not of deception, and that in the embarrassing circumstances and among the harassing surroundings of their lives, clergy as well as laity had occasionally acted with neither tact nor discretion. No one is more alive to the sufferings or the injustices endured by English Catholics in the early part of the seventeenth century, or more admires the courage and patience shown by many, if not most, of those who bore them, than myself; and it is only in fairness to those sufferers, and with a desire to look at their actions honestly, and, as much as may be, impartially, that I approach the subject in this spirit. I have laid the more emphasis on the dangers of secrecy, be it ever so unavoidable or enforced, because of their bearing upon a matter which will necessarily figure largely in the forthcoming pages.

Lady Digby had no sooner been received into the Church than she became exceedingly anxious for the conversion of her husband, but news now arrived which made her anxious about him on another account. A messenger brought the tidings that Sir Everard was very seriously ill in London, and Lady Digby at once determined to start on the journey of some forty-five or fifty miles in order to nurse him. Her guests volunteered to go to him also, and they were able to accomplish the distance, over the bad roads of that period, much more rapidly than she was.

I will let Father Gerard give an account of his own proceedings with Digby for himself.[40] “I spoke to him of the uncertainty of life, and the certainty of misery, not only in this life, but especially in the next, unless we provided against it; and I showed him that we have here no abiding city, but must look for one to come. As affliction often brings sense, so it happened in this case, for we found little difficulty in gaining his goodwill.

“He prepared himself well for confession after being taught the way; and when he learnt that I was a priest, he felt no such difficulty in believing as his wife had done, because he had known similar cases, but he rather rejoiced at having found a confessor who had experience among persons of his rank of life, and with whom he could deal at all times without danger of its being known that he was dealing with a priest. After his reconciliation he began on his part to be anxious about his wife, and wished to consult with us how best to bring her to the Catholic religion. We both smiled at this, but said nothing at the time, determining to wait till his wife came up to town, that we might witness how each loving soul would strive to win the other.”

When Digby had recovered and had returned to Gothurst with his wife, they both paid a visit to Father Gerard at the country house, some distance from their own home, at which he lived as chaplain. This was probably Mrs Vaux’s house at Stoke Pogis, of which we shall have something to say a little later. While there, he was taken ill even more seriously than before. His life became in danger, and the best doctors in Oxford were sent for to his assistance. They despaired of curing him, and “he began to prepare himself earnestly for a good death.”His poor young wife, being told that her husband could not recover, began “to think of a more perfect way of life,”in case she should be left a widow. It may be thought that she might at least have waited to do this until after the death of her husband, but it is possible, and even probable, although not mentioned by Father Gerard, that Sir Everard himself desired her to consider what manner of life she would lead when he should be gone. She would be a very young widow with a large property, and Sir Everard would doubtless feel anxious as to what would become of her.[41] “For some days,”says Father Gerard, “she gave herself to learn the method of meditation, and to find out God’s will with regard to her future life, how she might best direct it to his glory. This was her resolution, but God had otherwise arranged, and for that time happily.”

Gerard himself was, humanly speaking, the means of prolonging Digby’s life, for, in spite of the verdict of the great physicians from Oxford, that nothing could save him, Father Gerard refused to give up all hope, and persuaded him to send for a certain doctor of his own acquaintance from Cambridge. “By this doctor, then, he was cured beyond all expectation, and so completely restored to health that there was not a more robust or stalwart man in a thousand.”

Not very long after he had become a Catholic, Digby was roughly reminded of the illegality of his position, by a rumour that his friend, Father Gerard, who had gone to a house to visit, as a priest, a person who was dying, was either on the point of being, or was actually, in the hands of pursuivants. This news distressed him terribly. He immediately told his wife that, if Father Gerard were arrested, he intended to take a sufficient number of friends and servants to rescue him, and to watch the roads by which he would probably be taken to London; and that “he would accomplish”his “release one way or another, even though he should spend his whole fortune in the venture.”The danger of such an attempt at that period was obvious. Certainly his desire to set free Father Gerard was most praiseworthy, but whether, had he attempted it in the way he proposed, he would have benefitted or injured the Catholic cause in England, may be considered at least doubtful. A rescue by an armed force would have meant a free fight, probably accompanied by some bloodshed, with this result, that, if successful, the perpetrators would most likely have been discovered, and sooner or later very severely dealt with as aggressors against the officers of the law in the execution of their duty, and that, if unsuccessful, the greater proportion of the rescuing party would have met their deaths either on the field at the time, or on the gallows afterwards. To attempt force against the whole armed power of the Crown seemed a very Quixotic undertaking, and the idea of dispersing the whole of his wealth, whether in the shape of armed force or other channels, in a chimerical effort to set free his friend, however generous in intent, scarcely recommends itself as the best method of using it for the good of the cause he had so much at heart. This incident shows Digby’s hastiness and impetuosity. Fortunately, the report of Father Gerard’s arrest turned out to be false; so, for the moment, any excited and unwise action on Sir Everard’s part was avoided.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] Life of Father John Gerard, p. cxxxvi.

[32] I write of Sir Everard and Lady Digby; but it is improbable that he had received knighthood at the period treated of in this chapter.

[33] Life of Father John Gerard, p. cl.

[34] Even his under-cook was a man. Cal. Sta. Pa. Dom., 1603-10, p. 266.

[35] Life of Gerard, p. cli.

[36] Life of Father John Gerard; p. cli.

[37] This Sir T. Gerard was committed to the Tower on an accusation “of a design to deliver Mary Queen of Scots out of her confinement.”—Burke’s Peerage, 1886, p. 576.

[38] Life of Gerard, p. clii.

[39] Life of Father John Gerard, p. cli.

[40] Life of Father John Gerard, p. cliii.

[41] Life of Father John Gerard, p. cliii.

CHAPTER III.

A change of religion causes, to most of those who make it, a very forcible wrench. It may be, probably it usually is, accompanied by great happiness and a sensation of intense relief; no regrets whatever may be felt that the former faith, with its ministers, ceremonies, and churches have been renounced for ever; on the contrary, the convert may be delighted to be rid of them, and in turning his back upon the religion of his childhood, he may feel that he is dismissing a false teacher who has deceived him, rather than that he is bidding farewell to a guide who has conducted him, however unintentionally, unwittingly, or unwillingly, to the gate of safety. Yet granting, and most emphatically granting, all this, we should not forget that there is another view of his position. Let his rejoicing be ever so great at entering that portal and leaving the land of darkness for the regions of light, be the welcome he receives from his future co-religionists as warm as it may, and be his confidence as great as is conceivable, the convert is none the less forsaking a well-known country for one that is new to him, he is leaving old friends to enter among strangers, and he is exchanging long-formed habits for practices which it will take him some time to understand, to acquire, and to familiarize.

A convert, again, is not invariably free from dangers. Let us take the case of Sir Everard Digby. A man with his position, popularity, wealth, intellect, and influence, was a convert of considerable importance from a human point of view, and he must have known it. If he lost money and friends by his conversion, much and many remained to him, and among the comparatively small number of Catholics he might become a more leading man than as a unit in the vast crowd professing his former faith; and although, on the whole, the step which he had taken was calculated to be much against his advancement in life, there are certain attractions in being the principal or one of the principal men of influence in a considerable minority. I am not for a moment questioning Digby’s motives in becoming a Catholic; I believe they were quite unexceptionable; all that I am at the moment aiming at is to induce the reader to keep before his mind that the position of an influential English convert, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, like most other positions, had its own special temptations and dangers, and my reasons for this aim will soon become obvious.

In comparing the situation of a convert to Catholicism in the latter days of Elizabeth or the early days of James I., with one in the reign of Victoria, we are met on the threshold with the fact that terrible bodily pains, and even death itself, threatened the former, while the latter is exposed to no danger of either for his religion. In the matter of legal fines and forfeitures, again, the persecution of the first was enormous, whereas the second suffers none. But of these pains and penalties I shall treat presently. Just in passing I may remark that many a convert now living has reason for doubting whether any of his forerunners in the times of Elizabeth or James I. suffered more pecuniary loss than he. One parent or uncle, by altering a will, can cause a Romish recusant more loss than a whole army of pursuivants.

Looking at the positions of converts at the two periods from a social point of view, we find very different conditions. Instead of being regarded, as he is now, in the light of a fool who, in an age of light, reason, and emancipation from error, has wilfully retrograded into the grossest of all forms of superstition, the convert, in the reigns of Elizabeth and James, was known to be returning to the faith professed by his fathers, one, two, or, at most, three generations before him. It was not then considered a case of “turning Roman Catholic,”but of returning to the old religion, and even by people who cared little, if at all, about such matters, he was rather respected than otherwise.

Now it is different. During the two last generations, so many conversions have apparently been the result of what is known as the Oxford Movement, or of Ritualism, that converts are much associated in men’s minds with ex-clergymen, or with clerical families; and to tell the truth, at least a considerable minority of Anglicans of good position, while they tolerate, invite to dinner, and patronise their parsons, in their inmost hearts look down upon and rather dislike the clergy and the clergy-begotten.

At present, again, a prejudice is felt in England against an old Catholic, prima facie, on the ground that he is probably either an Irishman, of Irish extraction, or of an ancient Catholic English family rendered effete by idleness, owing to religious disabilities, or by a long succession of intermarriages. It would be easy to prove that these prejudices, if not altogether without foundation in fact, are immensely and unwarrantably exaggerated, but my object, at present, is merely to state that they exist. Three hundred years ago, whatever may have been the prejudices against Catholics, old or new, they cannot have arisen on such grounds as these, and if Protestants attributed the tenacity of the former and the determined return of the latter to their ancient faith rather to pride than to piety, there is no doubt which motive would be most respected in the fashionable world.

The conduct of the Digbys, immediately after their conversion, was most exemplary. They threw themselves heart and soul into their religion, and Father Gerard, who had received them into the Church, writes[42] of Sir Everard in the highest terms, saying:—“He was so studious a follower of virtue, after he became a Catholic, that he gave great comfort to those that had the guiding of his soul (as I have heard them seriously affirm more than once or twice), he used his prayers daily both mental and vocal, and daily and diligent examination of his conscience: the sacraments he frequented devoutly every week, &c.”“Briefly I have heard it reported of this knight, by those that knew him well and that were often in his company, that they did note in him a special care of avoiding all occasions of sin and of furthering acts of virtue in what he could.”

He read a good deal in order to be able to enter into controversy with Protestants, and he was the means of bringing several into the Church—“some of great account and place.”As to his conversation, “not only in this highest kind, wherein he took very great joy and comfort, but also in ordinary talk, when he had observed that the speech did tend to any evil, as detraction or other kind of evil words which sometimes will happen in company, his custom was presently to take some occasion to alter the talk, and cunningly to bring in some other good matter or profitable subject to talk of. And this, when the matter was not very grossly evil, or spoken to the dishonour of God or disgrace of his servants; for then, his zeal and courage were such that he could not bear it, but would publicly and stoutly contradict it, whereof I could give divers instances worth relating, but am loth to hold the reader longer.”Finally, in speaking of those “that knew him”and those “that loved him,”Father Gerard says, “truly it was hard to do the one and not the other.”

Like most Catholics living in the country, and inhabiting houses of any size, the Digbys made a chapel in their home, “a chapel with a sacristy,” says Father Gerard,[43] “furnishing it with costly and beautiful vestments;”and they “obtained a Priest of the Society”(of Jesus) “for their chaplain, who remained with them to Sir Everard’s death.”Of this priest, Gerard says[44] that he was a man “who for virtue and learning hath not many his betters in England.”This was probably Father Strange,[45] who usually passed under the alias of Hungerford. He was the owner of a property, some of which, in Gloucestershire, he sold,[46] and “£2000 thereof is in the Jesuites’ bank”said a witness against him. He was imprisoned, after Sir Everard Digby’s death, for five or six years.[47] In an underground dungeon in the Tower[48] “he was so severely tortured upon the rack that he dragged on the rest of his life for thirty-three years in the extremest debility, with severe pains in the loins and head. Once when he was in agony upon the rack, a Protestant minister began to argue with him about religion; whereupon, turning to the rack-master, Father Strange[49] “asked him to hoist the minister upon a similar rack, and in like fetters and tortures, otherwise, said he, we shall be fighting upon unequal terms; for the custom everywhere prevails amongst scholars that the condition of the disputants be equal.”

Another Jesuit Father, at one time private chaplain to Sir Everard Digby, was Father John Percy,[50] who afterwards, under the alias of Fisher, held the famous controversy with Archbishop Laud in the presence of the king and the Countess of Buckingham, to whom he acted as chaplain for ten years. He also had been fearfully tortured in prison, in the reign of Elizabeth; and if he recounted his experiences on the rack to Sir Everard Digby, the hot blood of the latter would be stirred up against the Protestant Governments that could perpetrate or tolerate such iniquities.

In trying to picture to himself the “chapel with a sacristy”made by the Digbys at Gothurst, a romantic reader may imagine an ecclesiastical gem, in the form of a richly-decorated chamber filled with sacred pictures, figures of saints, crucifixes, candles, and miniature shrines. Before taking the trouble of raising any such representation before the mind, it would be well to remember that, in the times of which we are treating, that was the most perfect and the best arranged chapel in which the altar, cross, chalice, vestments, &c., could be concealed at the shortest possible notice, and the chamber itself most quickly made to look like an ordinary room. The altar was on such occasions a small slab of stone, a few inches in length and breadth, and considerably less than an inch in thickness. It was generally laid upon the projecting shelf of a piece of furniture, which, when closed, had the appearance of a cabinet. Some few remains of altars and other pieces of “massing stuff,” as Protestants called it, of that date still remain, as also do many simple specimens used in France during the Revolution of last century, which have much in common with them. To demonstrate the small space in which the ecclesiastical contents of a private chapel could be hidden away in times of persecution, I may say that, even now, for priests who have the privilege of saying mass elsewhere than in churches or regular chapels—for instance, in private rooms, on board ship,[51] or in the ward of a hospital—altar, chalice, paten, cruets, altar-cloths, lavabo, alb, amice, girdle, candlesticks, crucifix, wafer-boxes, wine-flask, Missal, Missal-stand, bell, holy-oil stocks, pyx, and a set of red and white vestments (reversible)—in fact, everything necessary for saying mass, as well as for administering extreme unction to the sick, can be carried in a case 18 inches in length, 12 inches in width, and 8 inches in depth. Occasionally, as we are told of the Digbys, rich people may have had some handsome vestments; but a private chapel early in the sixteenth century must have been a very different thing from what we associate with the term in our own times, and however well furnished it may have been as a room, it must have been almost devoid of “ecclesiastical luxury.”

Here and there were exceptions, in which Catholics were very bold, but they always got into trouble. For instance, when Luisa de Carvajal came to England, she was received at a country house—possibly Scotney Castle, on the borders of Kent and Sussex—the chapel of which[52] “was adorned with pictures and images, and enriched with many relics. Several masses were said in it every day, and accompanied by beautiful vocal and instrumental music.”It was “adorned not only with all the requisites, but all the luxuries, so to speak, of Catholic worship;”and Luisa could walk “on a spring morning in a pleached alley, saying her beads, within hearing of the harmonious sounds of holy music floating in the balmy air.”What was the consequence? “The beautiful dream was rudely dispelled. One night, after she had been at this place about a month, a secret warning was given to the master of this hospitable mansion, that he had been denounced as a harbourer of priests, and that the pursuivants would invade his house on the morrow. On the receipt of this information, measures were immediately taken to hide all traces of Catholic worship, and a general dispersion took place.”I only give this as a typical case to show how necessary it then was to make chapels and Catholic worship as secret as possible.

Sir Everard Digby was anxious that others, as well as himself, should join the body which he believed to be the one, true, and only Church of God, and of this I have nothing to say except in praise. An anecdote of his efforts in this direction, however, is interesting as showing, not only the necessities of the times, but also something of the character and disposition of the man. In studying a man’s life, there may be a danger of building too much upon his actions, as if they proved his inclinations, when they were in reality only the result of exceptional circumstances, and I have no wish to force the inferences, which I myself draw from the following facts, upon the opinions of other people; I merely submit them for what they are worth.

Father Gerard says[53] that Sir Everard “had a friend for whom he felt a peculiar affection,”namely, Oliver Manners, the fourth son of John, fourth Earl of Rutland, and said by Father J. Morris[54] to have been knighted by King James I. “on his coming from Scotland,”on April 22nd, 1603, but by Burke,[55] “at Belvoir Castle, 23rd April 1608.”He was very anxious that this friend should be converted to the Catholic faith, and that, to this end, he should make the acquaintance of Father Gerard; “but because he held an office in the Court, requiring his daily attendance about the King’s person, so that he could not be absent for long together,”this “desire was long delayed.”At last Sir Everard met Manners in London at a time when he knew that Father Gerard was there also, “and he took an opportunity of asking him to come at a certain time to play at cards, for these are the books gentlemen in London study both night and day.”Instead of inviting a card-party, Digby invited no one except Father Gerard, and when Manners arrived, he found Gerard and Digby “sitting and conversing very seriously.”The latter asked him “to sit down a little until the rest should arrive.”After a short silence Sir Everard said:—

“We two were engaged in a very serious conversation, in fact, concerning religion. You know that I am friendly to Catholics and to the Catholic faith; I was, nevertheless, disputing with this gentleman, who is a friend of mine, against the Catholic faith, in order to see what defence he could make, for he is an earnest Catholic, as I do not hesitate to tell you.”At this he turned to Father Gerard and begged him not to be angry with him for betraying the fact of his being a Romish recusant to a stranger; then he said to Manners, “And I must say he so well defended the Catholic faith that I could not answer him, and I am glad you have come to help me.”

Manners “was young and confident, and trusting his own great abilities, expected to carry everything before him, so good was his cause and so lightly did he esteem”his opponent, “as he afterwards confessed.” After an hour’s sharp argument and retort on either side, Father Gerard began to explain the Catholic faith more fully, and to confirm it with texts of Scripture, and passages from the Fathers.

Manners listened in silence, and “before he left he was fully resolved to become a Catholic, and took with him a book to assist him in preparing for a good confession, which he made before a week had passed.” He became an excellent and exemplary Christian, and his life would make an interesting and edifying volume.

All honour to Sir Everard Digby for having been the human medium of bringing about this most happy and blessed conversion! It might have been difficult to accomplish it by any other method. In those days of persecution, stratagem was absolutely necessary to Catholics for their safety sake, even in everyday life, and still more so in evangelism. As to the particular stratagem used by Digby in this instance, I do not go so far as to say that it was blame-worthy; I have often read of it without mentally criticising it; I have even regarded it with some degree of admiration; but, now that I am attempting a study of Sir Everard Digby’s character, and seeking for symptoms of it in every detail that I can discover of his words and actions, I ask myself whether, in all its innocence, his conduct on this occasion did not exhibit traces of a natural inclination to plot and intrigue. Could he have induced Manners to come to his rooms by no other attraction than a game of cards, which he had no intention of playing? Was it necessary on his arrival there to ask him to await that of guests who were not coming, and had never been invited? Was he obliged, in the presence of so intimate a friend, to pretend to be only well-disposed towards Catholics instead of owning himself to be one of them? Need he have put himself to the trouble of apologising to Father Gerard for revealing that he was a Catholic? In religious, as in all other matters, there are cases in which artifice may be harmless or desirable, or even a duty, but a thoroughly straightforward man will shrink from the “pious dodge”as much as the kind-hearted surgeon will shrink from the use of the knife or the cautery.

Necessary as they may have been, nay, necessary as they undoubtedly were, the planning, and disguising, and hiding, and intriguing used as means for bringing about the conversions of Lady Digby, Sir Everard Digby, and Oliver Manners, though innocent in themselves, placed those concerned in them in that atmosphere of romance, adventure, excitement, and even sentiment, which I have before described, and it is obvious that such an atmosphere is not without its peculiar perils.

It is certainly very comfortable to be able to preach undisturbed, to convert heretics openly, and to worship in the churches of the King and the Government; yet even in religion, to some slight degree, the words of a certain very wise man may occasionally be true, that[56] “stolen waters are sweeter, and hidden bread is more pleasant.”Nothing is more excellent than missionary work; but it is a fact that proselytism, when conducted under difficulties and dangers, whether it be under the standard of truth or under the standard of error, is not without some of the elements of sport; at any rate, if it be true, as enthusiasts have been heard to assert, that even the hunted fox is a partaker in the pleasures of the chase, the Jesuits had every opportunity of enjoying them during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I.

Besides a consideration of the personal characteristics of Sir Everard Digby, and the position of converts to Catholicism in his times, it will be necessary to take a wider view of the political, social, and religious events of his period. Otherwise we should be unable to form anything like a fair judgment either of his own conduct, or of the treatment which he received from others.

The oppression and persecution of Catholics by Queen Elizabeth and her ministers was extreme. It was made death to be a priest, death to receive absolution from a priest, death to harbour a priest, death even to give food or help of any sort to a priest, and death to persuade anyone to become a Catholic. Very many priests and many laymen were martyred, more were tortured, yet more suffered severe temporal losses. And, what was most cruel of all, while Statutes were passed with a view to making life unendurable for Catholics in England itself, English Catholics were forbidden to go, or to send their children, beyond the seas without special leave.

The actual date of the Digbys’ reception into the Catholic Church is a matter of some doubt. It probably took place before the death of Elizabeth. That was a time when English Catholics were considering their future with the greatest anxiety. Politics entered largely into the question, and where politics include, as they did then, at any rate, in many men’s minds, some doubts as to the succession to the crown, intrigue and conspiracy were pretty certain to be practised.

FOOTNOTES:

[42] A Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, p. 89.

[43] Life of Father John Gerard, p. clv.

[44] A Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, p. 89.

[45] Father H. Garnet and the Gunpowder Plot, by Father Pollen, p. 15.

[46] Records of the English Province. S.J. Series, ix. x. xi., p. 3.

[47] Ib., p. 5, and Stoneyhurst MSS.

[48] Ib., p. 3.

[49] Ib., p. 4.

[50] Records, S.J. Series, i., p. 527.

[51] In his Mores Catholici (Cincinnati, 1841, Vol. II. p. 364), Kenelm H. Digby says that "Portable altars were in use long before the eleventh century. St Wulfran, Bishop of Sens, passing the sea in a ship, is said to have celebrated the sacred mysteries upon a portable altar."

[52] The Life of Luisa de Carvajal, by Lady G. Fullerton, p. 154, seq.

[53] Life of Father John Gerard, p. clxvi. seq.

[54] Ib., footnote to p. cciii.

[55] Peerage, 1886, p. 1173.

[56] Proverbs ix. 17.

CHAPTER IV.

The responsibility of the intrigues in respect to the claims to the English throne, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, rests to some extent upon Queen Elizabeth herself. As Mr Gardiner puts it:—[57] “She was determined that in her lifetime no one should be able to call himself her heir.”It was generally understood that James would succeed to the throne; but, so long as there was the slightest uncertainty on the question, it was but natural that the Catholics should be anxious that a monarch should be crowned who would favour, or at least tolerate them, and that they should make inquiries, and converse eagerly, about every possible claimant to the throne. Fears of foreign invasion and domestic plotting were seriously entertained in England during the latter days of Elizabeth, as well as immediately after her death. “Wealthy men had brought in their plate and treasure from the country, and had put them in places of safety. Ships of war had been stationed in the Straits of Dover to guard against a foreign invasion, and some of the principal recusants had, as a matter of precaution, been committed to safe custody.”[58]

When James VI. of Scotland, the son of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, ascended the throne, rendered vacant by the death of Elizabeth, as James I. of England, no voice was raised in favour of any other claimant, and[59] “the Catholics, flattered by the reports of their agents, hailed with joy the succession of a prince who was said to have promised the toleration of their worship, in return for the attachment which they had so often displayed for the house of Stuart.”King James owed toleration, says Lingard, “to their sufferings in the cause of his unfortunate mother;”and “he had bound himself to it, by promises to their envoys, and to the princes of their communion.”

The opinion that the new king would upset and even reverse the anti-Catholic legislation of Elizabeth was not confined to the Catholic body: many Protestants had taken alarm on this very score, as may be inferred from a contemporary tract, entitled[60] Advertisements of a loyal subject to his gracious Sovereign, drawn from the Observation of the People’s Speeches, in which the following passage occurs:—“The plebes, I wotte not what they call them, but some there bee who most unnaturally and unreverentlie, by most egregious lies, wound the honour of our deceased soveraigne, not onlie touching her government and good fame, but her person with sundry untruthes,” and after going on in this strain for some lines it adds:—“Suerlie these slanders be the doings of the papists, ayming thereby at the deformation of the gospell.”[61]

On the other hand, there were both Catholics and Puritans who were distrustful of James. Sir Everard cannot have been long a Catholic, when a dangerous conspiracy was on foot. Sir Griffin Markham, a Catholic, and George Brooke, a Protestant, and a brother of Lord Cobham’s, hatched the well-known plot which was denominated “the Bye,”and, among many others who joined it, were two priests, Watson and Clarke, both of whom were eventually executed on that account. Its object appears to have been to seize the king’s person, and wring from him guarantees of toleration for both Puritans and Catholics. Father Gerard acquired some knowledge of this conspiracy, as also did Father Garnet, the Provincial of the Jesuits, and Blackwell, the Archpriest; and they insisted upon the information being laid instantly before the Government. Before they had time to carry out their intention, however, it had already been communicated, and the complete failure of the attempt is notorious. The result was to injure the causes of both the Catholics and the Puritans, and James never afterwards trusted the professions of either.

So far as the Catholics were concerned, the “Bye” conspiracy unfortunately revealed another; for Father Watson, in a written confession which he made in prison, brought accusations of disloyalty against the Jesuits. It was quite true that, two years earlier, Catesby, Tresham, and Winter—all friends of Sir Everard Digby’s—had endeavoured to induce Philip of Spain to invade England, and had asked Father Garnet to give them his sanction in so doing; but Garnet had “misliked it,”and had told them that it would be as much “disliked at Rome.”[62]

Winter had arranged that if Queen Elizabeth should die before the invasion, the news should be at once sent to the Spanish court. For this purpose, a Yorkshire gentleman, named Christopher Wright, and one Guy, or Guido, Faukes, or Fawkes, “a soldier of fortune,”of whom we shall have more to say by-and-bye, were sent to the Court of Spain in 1603. Although Father Garnet disapproved of the plan, he had given Wright a letter of introduction to a Jesuit at the Spanish Court. Neither Wright nor Fawkes were able to rouse King Philip, who said that he had no quarrel with his English brother, and that he had just appointed an ambassador to the Court of St James’s to arrange the terms of a lasting peace with the English nation. Knowing something of this, Father Watson used it as an instrument of revenge against the Jesuits, who, he knew, had intended to warn King James against his own attempt to entrap him.[63] “It is well known to all the world,”he wrote, “how the Jesuits and Spanish faction had continually, by word, writing, and action, sought his majesty’s destruction, with the setting up of another prince and sovereign over us; yea, and although it should be revealed what practises they had, even in this interim betwixt the proclaiming and crowning of his majesty.”And then he enumerated some of these “practises,”among others, “levying 40,000 men to be in a readiness for the Spaniard or Archduke; by buying up all the great horses, as Gerard doth; by sending down powder and shot into Staffordshire and other places, with warning unto Catholics to be in a readiness; by collection of money under divers pretences, to the value of a million;”“by affirming that none might yield to live under an heretic (as they continually termed his majesty);”“and by open speech that the king and all his royal issue must be cut off and put to death.”In making these bitter and, for the most part, untrue accusations against the Jesuits, he complained that he was “accounted for no better than an infidel, apostate, or atheist, by the jesuitical faction,”and that he was never likely “to receive any favour”from his majesty “so long as any Jesuit or Spaniard”remained “alive within this land.”

Undoubtedly, during the cruel persecutions of Elizabeth, Jesuits, as well as secular priests, and Catholic laymen too, for that matter, had hoped that her successor on the English throne might be of their own religion; they had good cause for doing so; the Pope himself had urged the enthronement of a Catholic monarch for their country, and in fairness, it must be admitted that not a few Englishmen, who considered themselves royalist above all others, had at one time refused to regard Elizabeth herself as the legitimate possessor of the British crown; but, when James had been established upon the throne, with the exception of a few discontents, such as the conspirators in the “Bye”plot and the diminutive Spanish party, the English Catholics, both lay and clerical, acknowledged him as their rightful king. Pope Clement VIII.[64] “commanded the missionaries”in England “to confine themselves to their spiritual duties, and to discourage, by all means in their power, every attempt to disturb the tranquillity of the realm;”he also ordered “the nuncio at Paris to assure James of the abhorrence with which he viewed all acts of disloyalty,”and he despatched “a secret messenger to the English Court with an offer to withdraw from the kingdom any missionary who might be an object of suspicion to the Council.”

Unfortunately, the discovery of the two conspiracies above mentioned, in which Catholics were implicated, weighed more with James than any assurances of goodwill from the Pope or his emissaries. Had not Watson given King’s evidence? Had not foreign invasion been implored by Catholics? Had they not intended “the Lady Arabella”as a substitute for his own Royal Majesty upon the throne? And had they not treasonably united with their extreme opposites, the Puritans, in a design to capture his precious person, with a view to squeezing concessions out of him, if not to putting him to death? To some extent he did indeed endeavour to conciliate the higher classes among his Catholic subjects, by inviting them to court, by conferring upon them the honour—such as it was—of knighthood, as in the case of Sir Everard Digby, and by promising to protect them from the penalties of recusancy, so long as by their loyalty and peaceable behaviour they should show themselves worthy of his favour and his confidence, but he absolutely and abruptly refused all requests for toleration of their religious worship, and more than once, he even committed to the Tower Catholics who had the presumption to ask for it.

The times were most trying to a recent convert like Sir Everard Digby. I will again quote Lingard[65] to show how faithless was James to the promises he had made of relief to his Catholic subjects:—“The oppressive and sanguinary code framed in the reign of Elizabeth was re-enacted to its full extent; it was even improved with additional severities.”

And then, after describing the severe penalties inflicted upon those who sent children “beyond the seas, to the intent that”they “should reside or be educated in a Catholic college or seminary,”as well as upon “the owners or masters of ships who”conveyed them, and adding that “every individual who had already resided or studied, or should hereafter reside or study in any such college or seminary, was rendered incapable of inheriting or purchasing or enjoying lands, annuities, chattels, debts, or sums of money within the realm, unless at his return to England, he should conform to the Established Church, he says:—”Moreover, as missionaries sometimes eluded detection under the disguise of tutors in gentlemen’s houses, it was provided that no man should teach even the rudiments of grammar without a license of the diocesan, under the penalty of forty shillings per day, to be levied on the tutor himself, and the same sum on his employer.”

And again, when James had been a year on the throne, the execution of the penal laws enabled the king “... to derive considerable profit,”says Lingard.[66] “The legal fine of £20 per lunar month was again demanded; and not only for the time to come, but for the whole period of the suspension; a demand which, by crowding thirteen separate payments into one of £260, exhausted the whole annual income of men in respectable but moderate circumstances. Nor was this all. By law, the least default in these payments subjected the recusant to the forfeiture of all his goods and chattels, and of two-thirds of his lands, tenements, hereditaments, farms, and leases. The execution of this severe punishment was intrusted to the judges at the assizes, the magistrates at the sessions, and the commissioners for causes ecclesiastical at their meetings. By them warrants of distress were issued to constables and pursuivants; all the cattle on the lands of the delinquent, his household furniture, and his wearing apparel, were seized and sold; and if, on some pretext or other, he was not thrown into prison, he found himself and family left without a change of apparel or a bed to lie upon, unless he had been enabled by the charity of his friends to redeem them after the sale, or to purchase with bribes the forbearance of the officers. Within six months the payment was again demanded, and the same pauperizing process repeated.”

It may be only fair to say, however, that Mr Gardiner thinks Lingard was guilty of exaggeration on one point; for he says[67] “the £20 men were never called upon for arrears, and, as far as I have been able to trace the names, the forfeitures of goods and chattels were only demanded from those from whom no lands had been seized.”

A letter in Father Garnet’s handwriting to Father Persons on these topics should have a special interest for us, as it was pretty certainly written at Gothurst, where he seems to have been staying at the time it is dated, October 4 and 21, 1605. It says[68]:—“The courses taken are more severe than in Bess’s time.... If any recusant buy his goods again, they inquire diligently if the money be his own: otherwise they would have that too. In fine, if these courses hold, every man must be fain to redeem, once in six months, the very bed he lieth on: and hereof, of twice redeeming, besides other precedents, I find one here in Nicolas, his lodging,”i.e., in the house of Sir Everard Digby. “The judges now openly protest that the king will have blood, and hath taken blood in Yorkshire; and that the king hath hitherto stroked papists, but now will strike:—and this is without any desert of Catholics. The execution of two in the north is certain:”—three persons, Welbourn and Fulthering at York, and Brown at Ripon, had in fact been executed in Yorkshire that year for recusancy.[69] Father Garnet continues:—“and whereas it was done upon cold blood, that is, with so great stay after their condemnation, it argueth a deliberate resolution of what we may expect: so that you may see there is no hope that Paul,”i.e. Pope Paul V., “can do anything; and whatsoever men give out there, of easy proceedings with Catholics, is mere fabulous. And yet, notwithstanding, I am assured that the best sort of Catholics will bear all their losses with patience: but how these tyrannical proceedings of such base officers may drive particular men to desperate attempts, that I cannot answer for;—the king’s wisdom will foresee.”

Mr Gardiner, in noticing the fines levied on recusants, mentions[70] one point in connection with them which would be peculiarly vexatious to a man of Sir Everard Digby’s temperament and position. “The Catholics must have been especially aggrieved by the knowledge that much of the money thus raised went into the pockets of courtiers. For instance, the profits of the lands of two recusants were granted to a foot-man, and this was by no means an isolated case.”

Sir Everard Digby’s great friend, Father Gerard, also testifies at great length to the persecutions under Elizabeth and James.[71] Father Southwell was put “nine times most cruelly upon the torture,”and the law against the Catholics “put to cruel death many and worthy persons,”and “many persons of great families and estimation were at several times put to death under pretence of treason, which also was their cloak to cover their cruelties against such priests and religious as were sent into England by authority from His Holiness to teach and preach the faith of Christ, and to minister his sacraments.”

Again, “their torturing of men when they were taken to make them confess their acquaintance and relievers, was more terrible than death by much, &c.” “Besides the spoiling and robbing laymen of their livings and goods, with which they should maintain their families, is to many more grievous than death would be, when those that have lived in good estate and countenance in their country shall see before them their whole life to be led in misery, and not only themselves, but their wives and children to go a-begging.” “And to these the continual and cruel searches, which I have found to be more terrible than taking itself. The insolencies and abuses offered in them, and in the seizures of goods, the continual awe and fear that men are kept in by the daily expectance of these things, while every malicious man (of which heresy can want no plenty) is made an officer in these affairs, and every officer a king as it were, to command and insult upon Catholics at their pleasure.”It may be readily imagined how the writer of all this would discuss this bad state of affairs with Sir Everard at Gothurst.

I have no wish to exaggerate the sufferings endured by Catholics during the reigns of Elizabeth and the early Stuarts. I willingly admit that in many cases the legal penalties were not enforced against them, nay, I would go further and frankly remind my Catholic readers—Protestants may possibly not require to have their memories thus stimulated—that half a century had not elapsed since Protestants were burned at the stake in Smithfield for their religion by Catholics. Besides all this, it is certain that toleration, as we understand it, is a comparatively modern invention, and that if Mary Queen of Scots had ascended the English throne, or if it had fallen into the hands of Spain, Protestants in this country might not have had a very comfortable time of it, especially in the process of disgorging property taken from the Church, and that, under certain circumstances, some of them might even have suffered death for their faith; but, while readily making this admission, I doubt whether any Catholic government ever attempted to oblige a people to relinquish a religion, which it had professed for many centuries, with the persistency and cruelty which the governments of Elizabeth and James I. exercised in endeavouring to oblige every British subject to reject the religion of his forefathers. Instances are not wanting of Catholics dealing out stern measures towards those who introduced a new religion into a country; this, on the contrary, was a case of punishing those who refused to adopt a new religion.

Nor was this the only ground on which the persecutions by James appeared unfair, tyrannical, and odious to Catholics. During the reign of Elizabeth they had endured their sufferings as the penalties of a religion contradicting that of their monarch. Perhaps they did not altogether blame her so much for her persecutions, as for persecuting the right religion in mistake for the wrong; and, after all, they knew she had been persuaded by her Council that, for purposes of State, it was necessary to break off relations with the Apostolic See, and to maintain the newly-fangled Anglican faith; they knew that the refusal of Rome to acknowledge her legitimacy, threatened the very foundations of her throne, and consequently made every Catholic seem a traitor in her eyes; they knew, too, that the Holy See had favoured Mary Queen of Scots, whom she had regarded as her most dangerous rival. Under these circumstances, therefore, while they found their troubles and trials excessively bitter, they may not have been very profoundly astonished at them. But when James, after a brief respite, continued and even increased the persecutions of the previous reign, they looked at the matter in quite a different light. In the first place, they expected that the Protestant son of so Catholic a mother, who had suffered imprisonment and death because she was a Catholic, could scarcely become the friend and accomplice of those who had betrayed and martyred his mother. I am not trenching on the question of the martyrdom of Mary Queen of Scots; I am merely writing of the feeling respecting her death, prevalent at that time among members of her own religion in this country. Secondly, unlike Elizabeth, James had no cause for fearing the Holy See; it never questioned his legitimacy; it had assisted him when King of Scotland; its adherents in England had almost universally hailed his accession to the crown with loyalty and rejoicing; and, as I have already shown, the Pope had sent messages to him, offering to assist in assuring the allegiance of the Catholics by removing any priests who might be obnoxious to him.

Even Goodman, the Protestant Bishop of Gloucester, wrote[72]:—“After Sixtus Quintus succeeded Clement Octavus, a man, according to his name, who was much given to mercy and compassion. Now to him King James did make suit to favour his title to the crown of England, which as King James doth relate in his book, Triplici nodo triplex cuneus, the Pope did promise to do.”James said that he would show favour to Catholics[73] “were it not that the English would take it ill, and it would much hinder him in his succession; and withall, that his own subjects in Scotland were so violent against Catholics, that he, being poor, durst not offend them. Whereupon the Pope replied, that if it were for want of means, he would exhaust all the treasures of the church and sell the plate to supply him.”And again, says Goodman of the English Catholics and King James[74]:—“And certainly they had very great promises from him.”Nevertheless,[75] “he did resolve to run a course against the papists,”and “at his discourses at table usually he did express much hatred to them.”

Father Gerard writes that[76] there were “particular embassagies and letters from His Majesty unto other Princes, giving hope at least of toleration to Catholics in England, of which letters divers were translated this year into French and came so into England, as divers affirmed that had seen them.”He was also “well assured that immediately upon Queen Elizabeth’s sickness and death, divers Catholics of note and fame, Priests also, did ride post into Scotland, as well to carry the assurance of dutiful affection from all Catholics unto His Majesty as also to obtain his gracious favour for them and his royal word for confirmation of the same. At that time, and to those persons, it is certain he did promise that Catholics should not only be quiet from any molestations, but should also enjoy such liberty in their houses privately as themselves would desire, and have both Priests and Sacraments with full toleration and desired quiet. Both the Priests that did kneel before him when he gave this promise (binding it with the word of a Prince, which he said was never yet broken), did protest so much unto divers from whom I have it. And divers others, persons of great worth, have assured me the same upon the like promise received from His Majesty, both for the common state of Catholics and their own particular.”

It is dangerous to make too much of evidence against which there may be the shadow of a suspicion. Father Gerard’s personal testimony can be accepted without the smallest hesitation; but that of Father Watson, who was probably one of the priests he mentioned who “did kneel before”James when he made the solemn promise which Father Gerard heard of at second hand, should be received with more caution. Lord Northampton’s statement in his speech at Sir Everard Digby’s trial should certainly obtain very careful consideration. “No man,”said he,[77] “can speak more soundly to the point than myself; for being sent into the prison by the King to charge him with this false alarm” (i.e., the report that James had promised toleration to Catholics), “only two days before his death, and upon his soul to press him in the presence of God, and as he would answer it at another bar, to confess directly whether at either or both these times he had access unto his Majesty at Edinburgh, his Majesty did give him any promise, hope, or comfort of encouragement to Catholics concerning toleration; he did there protest upon his soul that he could never win one inch of ground or draw the smallest comfort from the King in those degrees, nor further than that he would have them apprehend, that as he was a stranger to this state, so, till he understood in all points how those matters stood, he would not promise favour any way; but did protest that all the crowns and kingdoms in this world should not induce him to change any jot of his profession, which was the pasture of his soul and earnest of his eternal inheritance. He did confess that in very deed, to keep up the hearts of Catholics in love and duty to the King, he had imparted the King’s words to many, in a better tune and a higher kind of descant than his book of plainsong did direct, because he knew that others, like sly bargemen, looked that way when their stroke was bent another way. For this he craved pardon of the King in humble manner, and for his main treasons, of a higher nature than these figures of hypocrisy, and seemed penitent, as well for the horror of his crime as for the falsehood of his whisperings.”

Probably Northampton may have exaggerated, possibly he may have lied, in making this statement; but there is this to be remembered, that owing to his false testimony against the Jesuits, already recorded in this chapter, Father Watson must be regarded as a somewhat discredited witness, and it will not do for us Catholics to accept his verbal evidence against King James, and then to turn round and repudiate the evidence against the Jesuits in his own handwriting,[78] without some very strong reason for so doing. A reason of a certain strength does indeed exist; for Watson’s evidence against James was given freely and uninterestedly; whereas his evidence against the Jesuits may very probably have been offered in the hope that it might be accepted as the price of pardon, or at least of some mitigation of the awful sufferings included in the form of death to which he had been sentenced.

Even if we altogether discard Watson’s evidence of James’s promises, enough remains to satisfy my own mind that the new king had given the Catholics more or less hope of toleration; and, if I am too easily satisfied on this point, there can be no sort of question that Sir Everard Digby, who was often with Father Gerard, and that many other English Catholics had been assured, rightly or wrongly, and believed, wrongly or rightly, that King James had solemnly promised to give them immunity from persecution, if not freedom of worship, and that he had basely and treacherously broken his faith with them and sold them for the price of popularity among his far more numerous Protestant subjects: who, then, can blame them for considering themselves to have been most unjustly, perfidiously, and infamously treated by that monarch?

It may be worth while to quote here again from Goodman, the Protestant Bishop of Gloucester, respecting the persecutions of the Catholics in the reign of James.[79] “Now that they saw the times settled, having no hope of better days, but expecting that the uttermost rigour of the law should be executed, they became desperate; finding that by the laws of the kingdom their own lives were not secured, and for the coming over of a priest into England it was no less than high treason. A gentlewoman was hanged only for relieving and harbouring a priest; a citizen was hanged only for being reconciled to the Church of Rome: besides, the penal laws were such and so executed that they should not subsist:—what was usually sold in shops and openly bought, this the pursuivant would take away from them as being popish and superstitious. One knight did affirm that in one term he gave twenty nobles in rewards to the doorkeeper of the attorney-general; another did affirm, that his third part which remained to him of his estate did hardly serve for his expense in law to defend him from other oppressions, besides their children to be taken from home to be brought up in another religion. So they did every way conclude that their estate was desperate, etc.”If objection should be taken to Goodman as a witness on the Protestant side, on the ground that he eventually became a Catholic, I would reply that, at the time he wrote what I have quoted, he was, as the editor of his Court of James the First says,[80] “an earnest and zealous supporter of the Church,”of England, and of James I., Goodman himself writes[81] in that very book:—“Truly I did never know any man of so great an apprehension, of so great love and affection—a man so truly just, so free from all cruelty and pride, such a lover of the church, and one that had done so much good for the church.”Such an admirer of King James might certainly be trusted not to say a word that he could honestly avoid about the ill-treatment endured by any class of his subjects during his reign.

FOOTNOTES:

[57] History of England, from the Accession of James I. to the outbreak of the Civil War, 1603-1642, Vol. i. p. 79.

[58] Gardiner’s History of England, Vol. i. p. 85.

[59] Lingard, Vol. vii. chap. i.

[60] Somers Tracts, Vol. ii. p. 147. From the Cotton Library, Faustina, c. 11, 12, fol. 61.

[61] “James was an alien.”“Supposing that on such principles King James was rejected, who would come next? The Lady Arabella Stuart, descended from Margaret, daughter of Henry VII. in the same manner as King James, save that her father was a second son, and King James’s father was the eldest. But she had the fact of her birth and domiciliation within the kingdom of England as a counter-poise to her father’s want of primogeniture.”“Without openly professing Roman Catholicism, she was thought to be inclined that way, and to be certainly willing to make favourable terms with the Roman Catholics.”Introduction by J. Bruce to Correspondence of King James VI. of Scotland with Cecil and others.

[62] Dodds’ Church History of England, Vol. iv. p. 8. Tierney’s Notes.

[63] Dodds’ Church History of England, Appendix i. p. xxxv.

[64] Lingard, Vol. vii. chap. i.

[65] Vol. vii. chap. i.

[66] Vol. vii. chap. i.

[67] History of England, 1603-42, Vol. i. p. 329, footnote.

[68] I quote from Dodd and Tierney, Vol. iv., Appendix xvi., p. ciii.

[69] Challoner, ii. 12, 13.

[70] History of England, 1603-42, Vol i. p. 230.

[71] Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, p. 16. seq.

[72] The Court of King James I., Vol. i. p. 82 seq.

[73] Ib., p. 83.

[74] The Court of King James I., Vol. i. p. 86.

[75] Ib. p. 87.

[76] Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, p. 24.

[77] Criminal Trials, Jardine, Vol. ii. p. 177.

[78] Quoted above. I copied from Dodd; but the original may be found in the S.P. Dom., James I., Vol. iii. n. 16.

[79] The Court of King James I., Vol. i. pp. 100-1.

[80] Introduction, p. viii.

[81] Vol. i. p. 91.

CHAPTER V.

Considering that the king had been led to distrust the Catholics through the two lately discovered plots in which some of their number had taken part, the best policy for those who remained loyal, and these were by far the majority, would have been to have taken every opportunity of displaying their faithfulness to their sovereign, and, for those whose position so entitled them, to present themselves as often as they conveniently could at his Court, even if their welcome was somewhat cold. Digby chose to follow an exactly opposite course. He went to Court on James’s accession and received knighthood, and then he returned to the country, only visiting London occasionally, and then not going to Court. Like his fellow-Catholics, he at first entertained hopes that the new king was about to exhibit toleration, and as much as any of them was he disappointed and embittered as time speedily began to prove the contrary. One cause of Sir Everard Digby’s disgust at the aspect of affairs, early in James the First’s reign, may have been that, as a courtier, he had expected much from the Queen’s being a Catholic,[82] and that not only did no apparent good come of it, but her example gave the greatest discouragement, as well as grave scandal, to such of her subjects as professed her own religion. Indeed, all that can safely be said of her Catholicism, is that she was[83] “a Catholic, so far, at least, as her pleasure-loving nature allowed her to be of any religion at all.”Nevertheless, “she took great delight in consecrated,”—or, as Catholics would say, blessed or sacred—“objects.”She had allowed herself to be crowned by[84] “a Protestant Archbishop; but when the time arrived for the reception of the Communion, she remained immovable on her seat, leaving the King to partake alone.” “Enthusiastic Catholics complained that she had no heart for anything but festivities and amusements, and during the rest of her life she attended the services of the church sufficiently to enable the Government to allege that she was merely an enemy of Puritanical strictness.”On one occasion, the king,[85] “with some difficulty,”had actually “induced her to receive the Communion with him at Salisbury, but she had been much vexed with herself since, and had refused to do it again. On Christmas Day she had accompanied him to Church, but since then he found it impossible to induce her to be present at a Protestant service. At one time Sir Anthony Standen, a Catholic, was employed by James on a mission to some of the Italian States, and he brought home with him some objects of devotion, as a present from the Pope to the Queen of England. These delighted her; yet, when the king heard of them, they were returned to the Pope through the Nuncio in Paris.”

Now to any good Catholic, especially to an exceedingly zealous convert in his first fervour, like Sir Everard Digby, a Protestant king might be tolerable, provided he treated his Catholic subjects properly; but a court presided over by a queen, herself a convert, who was a most indifferent Catholic, if not an apostate,[86] would be odious in the extreme. It was difficult enough, in any case, to make many simple Catholics understand that there was anything very wrong in avoiding persecution by putting in an occasional appearance at the Protestant churches, without joining in the service, if they heard mass when they could, and went regularly to confession and communion; but the difficulty was immensely increased when they heard that the greatest lady in the land, who was herself a Catholic, did that very thing. Again, the country-gentlemen of high estate, Sir Everard Digby among them, suffered fines and penalties for their faith; yet here was the Catholic queen herself, contently living in the greatest luxury, and yielding on the most important points of her religion, in order to obtain it.[87] No wonder, therefore, that Sir Everard Digby absented himself from Court, however impolitic it may have been in him to do so.

In his country home, at Gothurst, he brooded, with much impatience, over the wrongs of his co-religionists, nor can it have been a pleasant reflection that at any moment his beautiful house might be broken into by pursuivants, who would hunt every recess and cupboard in it, in search of a priest, or of what Anglicans then denominated “massing-stuff.” Should they suspect that the most richly carved pieces of oak-work concealed a hiding-place, the “officers of justice”would ruthlessly shatter them to pieces with axe or crowbar; his wife’s private rooms would not be safe from the intrusion of the pursuivants, or the bevy of rough followers who might accompany them; and, if his house were filled with guests, even were they Protestants, it would none the less necessarily be given up to the intruders for so long a time as they might choose to remain. The invasion would be as likely to be made by night as by day; no notice would be given of its approach, and, as its result, not only might the domestic chaplain be carried off a prisoner, with his face to a horse’s tail and his legs tied together beneath its girths, but Sir Everard himself would be liable to be taken away in the same humiliating position, on a charge of High Treason.

The fine which Catholics had to pay must have been sufficiently annoying even to a rich man like Sir Everard Digby, and this annoyance would be greatly increased by the knowledge that to poorer men it meant ruin, as well as by the remarks of his less wealthy Catholic friends that “after all, to him it was a mere nothing.”

The present was bad enough, and worse things were expected in the future. Most of us know the fears with which we hear that a Prime Minister of opposite politics to our own is going to bring in a bill, in the coming session, directed against our personal interests; even the coming budget of a Chancellor of the Exchequer on our own side of the House, in a very bad year, is anticipated with serious misgivings. Imagine, therefore, the terrors of the Catholics whose lives would already have been rendered unendurable, had the laws existing against them been put into full force, when they not only observed a rapidly increasing zeal among magistrates and judges in their proceedings against Romish recusants, but heard, on what appeared to be excellent authority, that additional, and most cruel, legislation against them was to be enacted in the Parliament shortly to be opened.

One of the most remarkable features in Sir Everard Digby’s character was his extreme susceptibility to the influence of others; and, for this reason, what may seem, at first sight, an undue proportion of a volume devoted to his biography, must necessarily be allotted to a description of the friends, and more especially one particular friend, under whose influence he fell; and, if my readers should sometimes imagine that I have forgotten Sir Everard Digby altogether, or if they should feel inclined to accuse me of writing Catesby’s life rather than Digby’s, I can assure them that I am guiltless on both counts. For the moment, however, I must beg them to prepare themselves for an immediate and long digression, or rather an apparent digression, and warn them that it will be followed by many others.

To an impetuous man, zealous to the last degree, but not according to knowledge, few things are more dangerous than an intimate friend of similar views and temperament. Exactly such a friend had Sir Everard Digby. Here is a description of him by one who knew him well.[88] He “grew to such a composition of manners and carriage, to such a care of his speech (that it might never be hurtful to others, but taking all occasions of doing good), to such a zealous course of life, both for the cause in general, and for every particular person whom he could help in God’s service, as that he grew to be very much respected by most of the better and graver sort of Catholics, and of Priests, and Religious also, whom he did much satisfy in the care of his conscience; so that it might plainly appear he had the fear of God joined with an earnest desire to serve Him. And so no marvel though many Priests did know him and were often in his company. He was, moreover, very wise and of great judgment, though his utterance was not so good. Besides, he was so liberal and apt to help all sorts, as it got him much love. He was of person above two yards high, and, though slender, yet as well proportioned to his height as any man one should see. His age (I take it) at his death was about thirty-five, or thereabouts. And to do him right, if he had not fallen into”—one particular and exceedingly “foul action and followed his own judgment in it (to the hurt and scandal of many), asking no advice but of his own reasons deceived and blinded under the shadow of zeal; if, I say, it had not been for this, he had truly been a man worthy to be highly esteemed and prized in any commonwealth.”

Be his attractions and virtues what they might, this man, Robert Catesby, had not anything like such an unblemished past as his friend, Sir Everard Digby. He was of an old Warwickshire and Northamptonshire family—he was the lineal descendant of William Catesby, who was attainted and executed for high treason after the battle of Bosworth Field.[89] Robert Catesby’s father, who had been an ardent Catholic, had suffered considerable losses in his estate, and been imprisoned on account of his religion; but Robert himself, on his father’s death, apostatized, became exceedingly dissolute, and still further impoverished the family property by his extravagance. Goodman, Bishop of Gloucester, says of him:[90] “For Catesby, it is very well known that he was a very cunning, subtle man, exceedingly entangled in debts, and scarce able to subsist.”

Some three or four years before Sir Everard Digby’s conversion, Catesby had returned to the faith of his fathers. Whatever may have been the love of his God manifested by the reformed reprobate, his hatred of his queen, and afterwards of his king, was unmeasured. I have no desire to say anything in disparagement of Catesby’s religious fervour; but, considering that he had once abjured the Catholic faith, it may be no harm to remark that some people seem to like to profess the religion hated most by their enemies, and to exhibit zeal for it in proportion to that shown by their enemies against it. With several of his friends, Catesby joined the ill-fated conspiracy of the Earl of Essex, in the course of which he was wounded, taken prisoner, and finally ransomed for £3000 in all. When fighting for Essex, he greatly distinguished himself as a swordsman. Later, as I have already said, he was implicated in the intrigue that sent Christopher Wright and Guy Fawkes to Madrid in the hope of inducing Philip of Spain to depose James I. A modern Jesuit, Father J. Hungerford Pollen, has well said of him:[91] “The owner of large estates in the counties of Northampton, Warwick, and Oxford, honourably married, with issue to perpetuate the ancient family of which he was the only representative—such is not the sort of man we should have thought likely to engage in a desperate adventure, and this presumption might be further strengthened by the consideration of his moral qualities. He was brave and accomplished, attractive to that degree which makes even sober men risk life and fortune to follow where he should lead, honest of purpose and truthful, and, above all, exceedingly zealous for religion. These qualities should have, and would have, insured him from the frightful error into which he fell, had they not run to excess in more than one direction. Full of the chivalry that characterised the Elizabethan period, he was also infected with its worldliness, a failing which ill accorded with the patience every Catholic had to practice, and, moreover, his force of character carried him into obstinate adherence to his own views and plans. This it was that worked such ruin upon himself and all those who came in contact with him. Happy times may lead such men so to direct their energies, that the evil side of their character is never displayed, but times of great temptation often bring out the latent flaw in unexpected ways.”

This is admirably put, except, perhaps, on one single point; and it is one of such importance that I will pause to consider it, especially as it applies to Sir Everard Digby, almost, if not quite, as much as to Catesby. In the reign of Elizabeth, it was not chivalry but the decay and abolition of chivalry and the chivalrous spirit which occasionally led to deeds which a knight-errant would have despised. As Sir Walter Scott says:—[92] “the habit of constant and honourable opposition, unembittered by rancour or personal hatred, gave the fairest opportunity for the exercise of the virtues required from him whom Chaucer terms a very perfect gentleman.”Again he says:—“We have seen that the abstract principles of chivalry were, in the highest degree, virtuous and noble, nay, that they failed by carrying to an absurd, exaggerated, and impracticable point, the honourable duties which they inculcated.”Chivalry, therefore, acted as a wholesome check upon the barbarity, the licentiousness, and the semi-civilisation of the middle ages, and when it was abolished, the knights and nobles, in spite of all the glamour of refinement and education in the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, still retained enough of the savage brutality of their forefathers to be occasionally very dangerous, when the discipline of chivalry had been withdrawn. “It is needless,”says Sir Walter Scott, “by multiplying examples, to illustrate the bloodthirsty and treacherous maxims and practices, which, during the sixteenth century, succeeded to the punctilious generosity exacted by the rules of chivalry. It is enough to call to the reader’s recollection the bloody secret of the massacre of St Bartholomew, which was kept by such a number of the Catholic noblemen for two years,[93] at the expense of false treaties, promises, and perjuries, and the execution which followed on naked, unarmed, and unsuspecting men, in which so many gallants lent their willing swords.”Now I am not going to enter here upon the question of Sir Walter Scott’s historical accuracy, or its contrary, on this horrible massacre; but might he not have extended his period “of treacherous maxims and practices,”which “succeeded to the punctilious generosity exacted by the rules of chivalry,”a few years later, and included, with the Massacre of St Bartholomew, the Gunpowder Plot? Catesby was quite a man of the type contemplated by Sir Walter Scott, gallant, charming, zealous, brave to a degree, and even pious, yet with something of the wild, lawless, and bloodthirsty spirit of the but partially-tamed savage, which every now and then asserted itself, until an even later period, unless it was kept under control by some such laws as those of chivalry. It was not, therefore, chivalry, but the want of chivalry, which led to the spirit, habits, and actions of Catesby and the other conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot.

I hope this digression—a digression from a digression—may be pardoned. It is high time that I returned to Robert Catesby in his relations to Sir Everard Digby.

It was likely enough that Sir Everard Digby should become intimate with a zealous Catholic landowner in the neighbouring counties of Northamptonshire, and Warwickshire, especially as Catesby’s mother’s house, at Ashby St Legers, was little more than twenty miles from Gothurst; but probably the reason of his seeing so much of him was that Catesby’s first cousin, Tyringham of Tyringham, lived only three-quarters of a mile from Gothurst, the two estates adjoining each other, either house lying within a short distance of the high road, on opposite sides of it.

Once on intimate terms, Sir Everard and Catesby were constantly together. In speaking of his master, Sir Everard’s page, William Ellis, said in his examination[94]:—“both at London and in the countrie Mr Robert Catesby hath kept him companie.”

In this not altogether desirable “companie,”Sir Everard Digby spent much time “in cogitation deep” upon the treatment of his fellow-religionists and countrymen. Both men were exasperated by the persecution which was going on around them, by the fickleness of their king, and by the dangers to which they, their wives, their families—for Sir Everard, as well as Catesby, had a child now—and their estates were exposed. Perhaps most irritating of all, to country-gentlemen of high position, was the then prevalent custom of sub-letting, or farming, the fines and penalties levyable upon Catholics to men who squeezed every farthing out of them that was possible. To be persecuted and fined by an authorized public official was bad enough; but to be pestered and tormented by a pettifogging private person who had purchased the right of doing so, as a speculation, must have been almost unendurable. The subject, however, which Digby and Catesby discussed most would probably be the severe anti-Catholic legislation which was apprehended from the new parliament. In this, said Catesby, the great danger lay. His surmises as to the form it might take would give him and his friend, Sir Everard, ample scope for contemplation, speculation, and conversation. The words of Scripture, “Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof,”do not appear to have occurred to their memories.

In periods of trouble and danger, as indeed in all others, men of different dispositions and temperaments take different views and different lines of conduct; there are optimists and pessimists, men who counsel endurance, men who advocate active resistance, men who advise waiting a little to see what may turn up, and men who urge that not a moment is to be lost. And so it was among the persecuted Catholics during the early years of the reign of James I. At the very time that men like Digby and Catesby were in the deepest depression of hopeless anxiety, the Spanish Ambassador was congratulating himself because he fancied he saw symptoms of the king’s inclination to become[95] a convert to the Catholic Church. On the other hand, among those who took the most gloomy view of the prospect, there were very distinct phases of thought and action. “England will witness with us,”says Father Gerard,[96] “that the greatest part by much did follow the example and exhortation of the Religious and Priests that were their guides, moving them and leading them by their own practice to make their refuge unto God in so great extremities.... This we found to be believed practically by most, and followed as faithfully, preparing themselves by more often frequentation of the Sacraments, by more fervent prayer, and by perfect resignation of their will to God, against the cloud that was like to cover them, and the shower that might be expected would pour down upon them after the Parliament, unto which all the chief Puritans of the land were called, and only they or their friends selected out of every shire to be the framers of the laws, which thereby we might easily know were chiefly intended and prepared against us.”

But he says all were not quite so perfect, and of these imperfect there were two leading divisions. The first[97] “fainted in courage, and, as St Cyprian noteth of his times, did offer themselves unto the persecutors before they felt the chief force of the blow that was to be expected.”Sir Everard Digby was not one of these. The second division were, as Father Gerard might most veraciously say, “much different from these, and ran headlong into a contrary error. For being resolved never to yield or forsake their faith, they had not patience and longanimity to expect the Providence of God, etc.”It is to be feared that he may have noticed this want of patience and longanimity in Sir Everard Digby and his companions. “They would not endure to see their brethren so trodden upon by every Puritan,”he goes on to say of this class, “so made a prey to every needy follower of the Court, or servant to a Councillor, so presented and pursued by every churchwarden and minister, so hauled to every sessions when the Justices list to meet, so wronged on every side by the process of excommunication or outlawry, and forced to seek for their own by law, and then also to be denied by law, because they were Papists; finally both themselves and all others to be denounced traitors and designed to the slaughter. These things they would not endure now to begin afresh after so long endurance, and therefore began amongst themselves to consult what remedy they might apply to all these evils,”&c., “so that it seems they did not so much respect what the remedy were, or how it might be procured, as that it might be sure and speedy—to wit, to take effect before the end of the Parliament from whence they seemed to expect their greatest harm.”

Those who followed the latter course may have included some who were in other respects good Christians; whether they showed the spirit of Martyrs and Confessors is another question.

Few things discouraged the English Catholics more than the goodwill and peaceful disposition shown to the new king by foreign Catholic kings and princes, notwithstanding that one final effort was made on their behalf by Spain, just as the treaty was being concluded with England for peace and the renewal of commercial intercourse. Velasco, the constable of Castile, who negotiated that treaty on behalf of Spain, was visited by Winter, at Catesby’s suggestion, and urged to assist the English Catholics. Although he promised to speak on their behalf, he made it clear that his country would make no sacrifice to obtain toleration for them.[98] So far as he had promised, he kept his word. He told James that whatever indulgence he might show to them would be regarded by Philip as a personal act of friendship towards himself, and that they were prepared to make a voluntary offering annually in the place of the fines at that time imposed upon them by law; and he laid before him statistics of the distress to which very many respectable English families had been reduced by clinging to the faith of their forefathers.

James’s reply was very decided. On any diplomatic question relating to the interests of England and Spain he would be ready and glad to confer with the Spanish representative, but the government of his own subjects was a domestic matter upon which he could not consent to enter with a foreigner. Besides this, he informed Velasco that, even were he himself inclined to better the condition of the Catholics, his doing so would offend his

Protestant subjects to such an extent as to endanger his throne.

It would almost seem as if Velasco’s endeavours on behalf of the Catholics had a contrary effect to that which had been intended; for, instead of granting them the smallest relief, James issued a proclamation, ordering the judges and magistrates to enforce the penal laws, and to adopt measures calculated to insure the detection of Catholic recusants. Before the judges started on their circuits, he called them together and charged them “to be diligent and severe against recusants.”[99] Accordingly, in the year 1604, about 1000 recusants were indicted in Yorkshire, 600 in Lancashire, and in the counties of Oxford, Berks, Gloucester, Monmouth, Hereford, Salop, Stafford, and in Wigorn, 1865.[100] Of Buckinghamshire, Sir Everard Digby’s county, I can find no return. In all, the number of Catholic recusants convicted in the years 1604-5 amounted to 5500. In July, a priest named Sugar was executed at Warwick, simply and only because he was a priest, and a layman, named Grissold, for “accompanying and assisting”him.[101] In the Star Chamber, a man named Pound accused Sergeant Phillips of injustice in condemning a neighbour of his to death, for no other crime except that he had entertained a Jesuit. Not only did the lords of the Star Chamber confirm and approve of this sentence of Sergeant Phillips, but they condemned Pound himself to lose one ear in London and one “in the country where he dwelleth,”and to be fined £1000, unless he would impeach those who advised him to make the suit. Fortunately this tremendous sentence was commuted, at the intercession of the French and Venetian Ambassadors, to standing for a whole day in the pillory.[102]

Bancroft had just ascended the archiepiscopal throne of Canterbury, full of zeal against the Papists. He urged his suffragan bishops to select the more wealthy and earnest among the Catholics, and, after first trying “sweet”and “kind means,”to excommunicate them if they should refuse to conform. Forty days after their excommunication, the Bishops were to certify their names in Chancery, and then to sue out a writ de excommunicato capiendo, an instrument which subjected the delinquents to outlawry, forfeiture, and imprisonment, and deprived them of the right of recovering debts, of suing for damages, of effecting legal sales or purchases, and of conveying their properties either by will or otherwise.[103] Goodman, Bishop of Gloucester, writes[104]:—“The Spiritual Court did not cease to molest them, to excommunicate them, then to imprison them; and thereby they were utterly unable to sue for their own.”Nor were the rumours of an approaching increase of severities, to be enacted in the ensuing parliament, mere exaggerated fancies. The denunciations of the Chancellor in the Star Chamber, and of Archbishop Bancroft at St Paul’s Cross, confirmed the reports that sterner legislation against recusants was impending in the coming session. On the other hand, it is just possible that these official threats may have been uttered only to terrify the Catholics into submission, and with no very serious expectation of their fulfilment.

During those distressing times, Catesby’s friends, among whom not the least was Sir Everard Digby, observed a change in his manner. He looked anxious and careworn; he was moody and abstracted at one moment, unusually loquacious and excitable at another. His mysterious absences from home were another source of uneasiness to those most intimate with him; so, too, were his large purchases of horses, arms, and gunpowder, which also attracted the attention of people who were not his friends; but he took great trouble to inform everybody that he was about to raise 300 horse, to join the English regiment which the Spanish Ambassador had prevailed upon King James to allow to be levied in England for the assistance of the Archduke in Flanders.[105]

Nevertheless, his friends were not satisfied. If he were really going to join the army in the Low Countries, why these long delays?

Great as was their intimacy, Catesby was in the condition just described for many months without confiding the real reason of his activity to Sir Everard Digby; although it is probable that he warned him to be prepared for any emergency which might arise for the use of men, arms, and horses. Both Digby and Catesby were heartily tired of a state of passive endurance; the tyranny which was crushing the Catholics was daily increasing, and Sir Everard might very naturally suppose that while Catesby had no definite plan for resisting it, he wished to be ready in case foreign powers might come to their assistance, or the whole body of English Catholics, goaded to desperation, might rise in rebellion against their oppressors. Freely as he might appear to talk to Digby, and satisfied as the latter may have felt that he had the confidence of his friend, Catesby in reality feared to intrust a great secret, which was absorbing his attention, to the brave but straightforward master of Gothurst.

Another of Catesby’s friends was less easy about him than Sir Everard Digby. Father Garnet, the Provincial of the Jesuits, suspected that some mischief was brewing, and seized an opportunity, when sitting at Catesby’s own table, of inculcating the duty of patient submission to persecution. His host, who was his personal friend as well as a great respecter of his wisdom as a priest, showed considerable irritation. Instead of treating the Provincial of the Jesuits with his usual reverence and courtesy, he flushed up and angrily exclaimed[106]:—“It is to you, and such as you, that we owe our present calamities. This doctrine of non-resistance makes us slaves. No authority of priest or pontiff can deprive man of his right to repel injustice.”

Another friend and frequent guest of young Sir Everard’s, after he became a Catholic, should be noticed. A younger son of a Worcestershire family, Thomas Winter had attractions for Digby, in his profound zeal for the Catholic Church, his scholarship, his knowledge of foreign languages, his powers of conversation, and his military experiences, as he had served in Flanders, France, and, says Father Gerard, “I think, against the Turk.”Unlike Catesby, he was “of mean stature, but strong and comely,” and of “fine carriage.”He was very popular in society, and “an inseparable friend to Mr Robert Catesby.”In age he was about ten years older than Sir Everard. Whatever his zeal may have been for the Catholic Church, he did not always live in the odour of sanctity, and on one occasion he incurred the grave displeasure of Father Garnet by conveying a challenge to a duel from John Wright, one of the earliest conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot, to an adversary who had offended him. The combatants met, and Winter, as Wright’s second, measured the swords of both duellists to ascertain whether they were of equal length; but the actual encounter was somehow prevented at the last moment.[107] Father Garnet says that he had a “hard conceit of him.”

In dealing with the subject of Digby’s friends, certainly his page, William Ellis, ought not to be forgotten. I have been unable to discover any details of his birth, except that he was heir to £80 a year—a much larger income, of course, in those days than in these—“if his father did him right.” He entered Sir Everard’s service at the age of seventeen, about May 1604.[108] How faithful he was to his master will appear by-and-bye.

Among Sir Everard’s younger friends was Lord Vaux of Harrowden, a cousin of Catesby’s. One reason of the intimacy is thus described by Father Gerard.[109] “Sir Everard had many serious occasions to come to my Lord Vaux’s; and then in particular, as I have learned since, being come from his [Digby’s] ancient house and chief living, which lay in Rutlandshire, from whence he could not go unto the house where his wife and family lay [Gothurst], but he must pass the door of Lord Vaux, his house, which also made him there an ordinary guest.”To harbour priests, and to defend the Catholic cause was no new thing in the family of Vaux, for, some twenty or thirty years earlier, Lord Vaux’s grandfather had been imprisoned and fined for sheltering Father Campian in his house.[110] His grandmother had been a daughter of John Tresham of Rushton, and of his cousin, Francis Tresham, we shall hear something presently. His mother and his aunts, Anne and Elizabeth, were most pious Catholics, but the religious atmosphere in which he was brought up does not seem to have led him to perfection; for, although as a young man he suffered imprisonment for his faith,[111] he afterwards had two sons, who bore the name of Vaux, by Lady Banbury during her husband’s lifetime;[112] and, although he married her after Lord Banbury’s death, she never had another child. Worse still, he left Harrowden and the other family estates to his illegitimate children, instead of to his brother, who succeeded him in the title, although his wife, on her side, claimed for her son that, as he was born during her first husband’s lifetime, he had a legal right to the title of Banbury. Accordingly, this son changed his surname to Knollys, and once actually sat, as Lord Banbury, in the House of Lords. As is well known, his descendants went on claiming and disputing the title until the year 1813, when their right to it was finally disallowed.

But what specially concerns my story is that Sir Everard Digby was endeavouring to bring about a marriage for this (then) very young Lord Vaux, with the “Lord Chamberlain his daughter,”[113] as Father Gerard writes; and, in a footnote, is added “Earl of Suffolk. Erased in Orig.”If this footnote is right, Sir Everard was probably trying to make a match for the youth with the very girl whom he eventually married, as Lady Banbury had been Elizabeth Howard, the eldest daughter of Lord Suffolk. Suffolk was Lord Chamberlain,[114] and curiously enough (when we consider that he seems to have had negotiations with Sir Everard Digby with respect to a match between his daughter and Lord Vaux), in his capacity of Lord Chamberlain, he suspected and led to the discovery of the gunpowder laid in the cellar beneath the Houses of Parliament.[115]

Sir Everard visited a good deal at the house of Lord Vaux’s mother, Mrs Elizabeth Vaux. This was a house in Buckinghamshire at Stoke Poges, that had been built by Sir Christopher Hatton,[116] the Lord Chancellor, who had died childless. It was let for a term of years to Mrs Vaux, and she not only established Father Gerard in it as her chaplain, but had hiding-places and other arrangements made, so that he could receive priests and Catholic laymen, as he might think well, for the good of the cause of religion. Here Sir Everard was probably thrown a good deal with Catesby and Tresham, as they were both related to his young host. Lord Vaux’s two aunts, Miss Anne Vaux and Eleanor, the wife of Edward Brooksby, lived with him and his mother, and Miss Anne was one of those who had serious misgivings as to the mysterious conduct of her cousin, Robert Catesby.[117] “Seeing at Winter’s and Grant’s”—Grant was a popular Warwickshire squire, a Catholic, and celebrated for his undaunted courage—“their fine horses in the stable, she told Mr Garnet that she feared these wild heads had something in hand, and prayed him to talk to Mr Catesby and to hinder anything that possibly he might, for if they should attempt any foolish thing, it would redound to his discredit. Whereupon he said he would talk to Mr Catesby.”

Another account of what was probably the same interview was given by Father Garnet himself, in his examination of March 12th, 1605.

[118]“He sayth that Mrs Vaux came to him, eyther to Harrowden or to Sir Everard Digby’s at Gothurst, and tould this exam^t. that she feared that some trouble or disorder was towards [them], that some of the gentlewomen had demanded of her where they should bestow themselves until the burst[119] was past in the beginning of the Parliament. And this exam^t. asking her who tould her so, she said that she durst not tell who tould her so: she was [choked] with sorrow.”

An attempt was made, later, to represent the name of Vaux to be the same as that of Fawkes:—[120] “Mrs Anne Vaux, or Fawkes, probably a relative of the conspirator;”for which there seems to be no foundation, and certainly there is none for the base imputation, in the same paragraph, of immorality between Anne Vaux and Father Garnet. Even the Protestant historian, Jardine, repudiates this calumny at considerable length.[121]

FOOTNOTES:

[82] In his History of the Catholic Church in Scotland, translated by Father H. Blair, Canon Bellesheim says (Vol. iii. p. 347) that she was probably received into the Church in 1600. But Father Forbes Leith, in his Narrative (pp. 272 seq.) gives an authority stating it to have taken place in 1598.

See also a very interesting article on “Anne of Denmark,”by the Rev. J. Stevenson, in The Month, Vol. 16 (xxxv.) pp. 256-265.

[83] History of England, from 1603-42. By S. R. Gardiner, Vol. i. p. 142. Also Degli Effetti to Del Bufalo, June 13/23, 16/26; Persons to Aldobrandino, September 18/28, Roman Transcripts, R.O.

[84] History of England, Gardiner, Vol. i, p. 116. Also Degli Effetti to Del Bufalo, Aug. 11, 1/11, Roman Transcripts, R.O.

[85] History of England, Gardiner, Vol. i. p. 142.

[86] In her Queens of England, Miss Strickland gives her authority for the statement that Queen Ann died “in edifying communion with the Church of England.”

[87] Her practical concealment of her religion may have been chiefly on her husband’s account. Father Abercromby, S.J., who received her into the Church, wrote that James I. said to her:—“Rogo te, mea uxor, si non potes sine hujusmodi (sacerdote) vivere, utaris quam poteris, secretissime, alias periclitabitur corona nostra.”Bellesheim’s Hist., p. 453.

[88] Father Gerard’s Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, pp. 56, 57.

[89] Dugdale’s Warwickshire, p. 506. Jardine’s Criminal Trials, Vol. ii. p. 26.

[90] Court of King James I., Vol. i p. 103.

[91] Father H. Garnet and the Gunpowder Plot, pp. 1 and 2.

[92] Essay on Chivalry.

[93] Where Sir Walter obtained his authority for this statement I do not know.

[94] S. P. Gunpowder Plot Book, Part I. No. 108.

[95] Roman Transcripts, Sep. 24th, 1604, P.R.O., Father H. Garnet and the Gunpowder Plot, p. 4.

[96] Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, p. 49.

[97] Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, p. 50.

[98] Lingard, Vol. vii. chap. i.

[99] Tierney’s Notes to Dodd, Vol. iv. p. 42.

[100] Dodd and Tierney, Vol. iv., Appendix xiv., pp. xciv., xcv.

[101] Ib., Vol. iv. pp. 40, 41.

[102] Lingard, Vol. vii. chap. i.

[103] Tierney’s Notes to Dodd, Vol. iv. pp. 41, 42.

[104] Court of King James I., Vol. i. p. 101.

[105] Jardine’s Gunpowder Plot, pp. 60-1.

[106] Lingard, Vol. vii. chap. i.

[107] S. P. Dom. James I., Vol.xix. n. 41. Garnet’s statement.

[108] S. P. Dom. James I., G. P. Book, Part I., n. 108.

[109] Narrative of the G. P., p. 138.

[110] Records S.J., Series i. p. 329.

[111] Life of Father Gerard, p. clxxxv.

[112] Burke’s Peerage, 1872.

[113] Narrative of the G. P., p. 137.

[114] Gardiner. History of England, Vol. x. p. 364.

[115] Gardiner’s History of England, Vol. i. p. 249.

[116] It was to this Sir Christopher Hatton, that Sir Everard’s father had dedicated his book A Dissuasive from taking away the Livings of the Church.

[117] Father H. Garnet and the Gunpowder Plot, Pollen, p. 20. P.R.O., March 11.

[118] S. P. Dom. James I., Vol. xix. n 40. See Records S.J., Vol. iv. p. 157.

[119] This could not mean the projected “burst”of gunpowder, of which she could have known nothing, but an attempt of some sort, about that time, to obtain relief for the Catholics by force of arms, which she appears to have expected, or rather, to have feared.

[120] Somers Tracts, Vol. ii. p. 108, footnote.

[121] Gunpowder Plot, pp. 176-8.

CHAPTER VI.

In the summer of the year 1605, Sir Everard Digby spent a week in London, and stayed at the lodgings in the Savoy of his friend Roger Manners,[122] the eldest brother of Sir Oliver Manners, whose conversion to the Catholic faith has been already noticed. This Roger Manners married the daughter and heir of the famous Sir Philip Sydney, and eventually succeeded his father, as fifth Earl of Rutland. Although Sir Everard stayed with Roger Manners, he “commonlie dieted at the Mearmaid in Bred Streete.”[123] He spent much of his time with the excellent Sir Oliver Manners, which was all very well; but, unfortunately, Robert Catesby also “kept him companie”a great deal; without, however, letting him know what was chiefly occupying him in London just at that time. Thomas Winter also came to see Sir Everard whilst he was in London, and his friendship with men who were conspiring to an evil end was endangering Digby without his knowing it. At that time he had no idea that any plot was in existence, although he was doubtless aware that many Catholics were considering what steps could be taken to relieve their condition; and the fact of his staying with Roger Manners proves that he had not come to London with any design of conferring with restless Catholics in a secret or underhand fashion.

After his visit to London, Sir Everard seems to have returned to Gothurst and to have continued his usual innocent country life, with its duties and pleasures. A letter among the Hatfield MS., written to him on the eleventh of June—his eldest boy’s birthday by the way[124]—treats of otter-hunting, and it is likely enough that Sir Everard practised this sport in the Ouse as well as in the other rivers and brooks of Buckinghamshire.

About the end of August, or perhaps early in September, 1605, a large party met at Gothurst, as guests of Sir Everard and Lady Digby, but with an ulterior purpose. To pray for the much-oppressed cause of the Catholic religion in England, for their suffering fellow-religionists, and for themselves, they had agreed to make a pilgrimage together to the famous shrine of St Winefride at Holywell, in Flintshire,[125] which would entail a journey of a hundred and fifty miles.[126] Sir Everard does not appear to have accompanied it; but, among those assembled at Gothurst who were to go on the pilgrimage were his young wife, Miss Anne Vaux, Brooksby and his wife, Thomas Digby, Sir Everard’s brother, who had evidently followed his example and become a Catholic, Sir Francis Lacon and his daughter, Father Garnet, the Provincial of the Jesuits, a lay-brother named Nicholas Owen, who usually accompanied him, and Father Strange, Sir Everard’s chaplain, making, with their servants and others, a party of pilgrims numbering little short of thirty. Later on, Father Darcy and Father Fisher also joined them.[127]

If, as it seems, Sir Everard did not go with the pilgrimage, the reason may have been that he was engaged in endeavouring to negotiate the proposed marriage between young Lord Vaux and a daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, although it seemed early to do so, as the boy was then only about fourteen.

“Riding westward,[128] the party of pilgrims would stop for the night at some Catholic friend’s house, and in the morning the two priests would say Mass. Even at Shrewsbury, when they had to put up at an inn, and at ‘a castle in a holt at Denbighshire,’ the daily Masses were said without interruption, and even the servants were present. At St Winefride’s Well, too, though the inn must have been small for so large a number, the Holy Sacrifice was again offered, and then the ladies went barefoot to the Well.[129] At Holywell they stopped but one night. Returning next day, they slept at a farmhouse seven miles from Shrewsbury, and after that they were again in the circle of their friends.”[130]