Note 1 — Chapter I

— The following quotation is from the “Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 1603-1610,” p. 254: — “Nov. 13 (1605) Declaration of Fras. Tresham — Catesby revealed the Plot to him on October 14th: he opposed it: urged at least its postponement, and offered him money to leave the kingdom with his companions: thought they were gone, and intended to reveal the Treason; has been guilty of concealment, but, as he had no hand in the Plot, he throws himself on the King’s mercy.”

Now surely it stands to reason that if Tresham had penned the Letter — Litteræ Felicissimæ — he would have never addressed his Sovereign thus. He would have triumphantly gloried in the effort of his pen, and “worked” (as the phrase goes) “his beneficent action for all that it was worth.” Tresham was held back by the omnipotence of the impossible; anybody can see that who reads his evidence.

Besides Mounteagle, Tresham (who died of a painful disease, strangurion, in the Tower 23rd December, 1605) probably would have had a powerful (if bribed) friend in the Earl of Suffolk. Hence his friends saying that had he lived they feared not the course of Justice. The Earl of Suffolk was a son of Thomas fourth Duke of Norfolk, by his second wife, Margaret Audley, the heiress of Sir Thomas Audley, of Walden, Essex. The Duke was beheaded in 1572 for aspiring to the hand of James the First’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots. It is to James’s credit that he seems to have treated the Howard family, in its various branches, with marked consideration, after ascending the English Throne. Thomas fourth Duke of Norfolk’s first wife was the heiress of the then last Earl of Arundel, Lady Mary Fitzalan. She left one son, Philip, who became the well-known Philip Howard Earl of Arundel and Surrey.