The Life of a Conspirator. Thomas Longueville
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