Though he must have been in a fearful state-as his signature,still preserved,in contrast with his natural hand-writing before he was put upon the dreadful rack,most frightfully shows.Bates,a very different man,soon said the Jesuits had had to do with the plot,and probably,under the torture,would as readily have said anything.Tresham,taken and put in the Tower too,made confessions and unmade them,and died of an illness that was heavy upon him.Rookwood,who had stationed relays of his own horses all the way to Dunchurch,did not mount to escape until the middle of the day,when the news of the plot was all over London.On the road,he came up with the two Wrights,Catesby,and Percy;and they all galloped together into Northamptonshire.Thence to Dunchurch,where they found the proposed party assembled.Finding,however,that there had been a plot,and that it had been discovered,the party disappeared in the course of the night,and left them alone with Sir Everard Digby.Away they all rode again,through Warwickshire and Worcestershire,to a house called Holbeach,on the borders of Staffordshire.They tried to raise the Catholics on their way,but were indignantly driven off by them.All this time they were hotly pursued by the sheriff of Worcester,and a fast increasing concourse of riders.At last,resolving to defend themselves at Holbeach,they shut themselves up in the house,and put some wet powder before the fire to dry.But it blew up,and Catesby was singed and blackened,and almost killed,and some of the others were sadly hurt.Still,knowing that they must die,they resolved to die there,and with only their swords in their hands appeared at the windows to be shot at by the sheriff and his assistants.Catesby said to Thomas Winter,after Thomas had been hit in the right arm which dropped powerless by his side,'Stand by me,Tom,and we will die together!'-which they did,being shot through the body by two bullets from one gun.John Wright,and Christopher Wright,and Percy,were also shot.Rookwood and Digby were taken:the former with a broken arm and a wound in his body too.
It was the fifteenth of January,before the trial of Guy Fawkes,and such of the other conspirators as were left alive,came on.
They were all found guilty,all hanged,drawn,and quartered:
some,in St.Paul's Churchyard,on the top of Ludgate-hill;some,before the Parliament House.A Jesuit priest,named HENRY GARNET,to whom the dreadful design was said to have been communicated,was taken and tried;and two of his servants,as well as a poor priest who was taken with him,were tortured without mercy.He himself was not tortured,but was surrounded in the Tower by tamperers and traitors,and so was made unfairly to convict himself out of his own mouth.He said,upon his trial,that he had done all he could to prevent the deed,and that he could not make public what had been told him in confession-though I am afraid he knew of the plot in other ways.He was found guilty and executed,after a manful defence,and the Catholic Church made a saint of him;some rich and powerful persons,who had had nothing to do with the project,were fined and imprisoned for it by the Star Chamber;the Catholics,in general,who had recoiled with horror from the idea of the infernal contrivance,were unjustly put under more severe laws than before;and this was the end of the Gunpowder Plot.
SECOND PART
His Sowship would pretty willingly,I think,have blown the House of Commons into the air himself;for,his dread and jealousy of it knew no bounds all through his reign.When he was hard pressed for money he was obliged to order it to meet,as he could get no money without it;and when it asked him first to abolish some of the monopolies in necessaries of life which were a great grievance to the people,and to redress other public wrongs,he flew into a rage and got rid of it again.At one time he wanted it to consent to the Union of England with Scotland,and quarrelled about that.At another time it wanted him to put down a most infamous Church abuse,called the High Commission Court,and he quarrelled with it about that.At another time it entreated him not to be quite so fond of his archbishops and bishops who made speeches in his praise too awful to be related,but to have some little consideration for the poor Puritan clergy who were persecuted for preaching in their own way,and not according to the archbishops and bishops;and they quarrelled about that.In short,what with hating the House of Commons,and pretending not to hate it;and what with now sending some of its members who opposed him,to Newgate or to the Tower,and now telling the rest that they must not presume to make speeches about the public affairs which could not possibly concern them;and what with cajoling,and bullying,and fighting,and being frightened;the House of Commons was the plague of his Sowship's existence.It was pretty firm,however,in maintaining its rights,and insisting that the Parliament should make the laws,and not the King by his own single proclamations (which he tried hard to do);
And his Sowship was so often distressed for money,in consequence,that he sold every sort of title and public office as if they were merchandise,and even invented a new dignity called a Baronetcy,which anybody could buy for a thousand pounds.
These disputes with his Parliaments,and his hunting,and his drinking,and his lying in bed-for he was a great sluggard-occupied his Sowship pretty well.The rest of his time he chiefly passed in hugging and slobbering his favourites.The first of these was SIR PHILIP HERBERT,who had no knowledge whatever,except of dogs,and horses,and hunting,but whom he soon made EARL OF
