Note 63 — Chapter XV
Reading edition
— Oldcorne, being a Jesuit, would from time to time go to White Webbs, Morecrofts (near Uxbridge), Erith-on-the-Thames, Stoke Pogis, Thames Street (London), and other places of Jesuit resort where Mounteagle and Ward had the entrée. Again, he must have known well the Vaux family of Harrowden, and all the circle that Mounteagle and Ward would move in. Again, if Ward were married in York, in 1579, he may have met Oldcorne as a Catholic medical student of promise in the ancient city.
Along with a dear brother, a young Yorkshireman, in London, I visited White Webbs, by Enfield Chase, on Saturday, the 6th October, 1900. The old house known as Dr. Hewick’s House, where the conspirators met, is now no longer standing; but the spacious park, with its umbrageous oak trees, meandering streams, tangled thickets, and pleasant paths, is almost unchanged, I should fancy, since it was the rendezvous of the Gunpowder traitors, concerning whom the utmost one can say is that they were not for themselves; and that Nemesis in this life justly punished them, and drove them to make meet expiation and atonement, before the face of all men, for their infamous offences. Thereby Destiny enabled the men to restore equality between the State they had so wronged, in act and in desire, and themselves; and a happy thing for the men, as well as for others, that Destiny did so enable them whilst there was yet time.
(In October, 1900, I was informed that the present mansion, known as White Webbs, belongs to the Lady Meúx.)