Note 84 — Chapter XX

— It is, moreover, possible that Mounteagle may have met his connection, and probably kinsman, Thomas Warde, at White Webbs, about the year 1602. Mounteagle, at that time, like the Earl of Southampton and the Earl of Rutland, was not allowed to attend Elizabeth’s Court on account of his share in the Essex tumult. He was, in fact, then mixed up with the schemes of Father Robert Parsons’ then-expiring Spanish faction among the English Catholics. If a certain Thomas Grey, to whom Garnet at White Webbs showed the papal breves (which the latter burnt in 1603, on James I. being proclaimed King by applause), were the same person as Sir Thomas Gray, he would be, most probably, a relative of Thomas Warde. For the Wardes, of Mulwith, certainly were related to a Sir Thomas Gray. — See “Life of Mary Ward,” vol. i., p. 221, where it is said that, “through the Nevilles and Gascoignes,” the Wards were related to the families of Sir Ralph and Sir Thomas Gray.[A]

As to father Garnet showing the breves to Thomas Grey, see Foley’s “Records,” vol. iv., p. 159, where it says: — Garnet “confesseth that in the Queen’s lifetyme he received two Breefs (one was addressed by the Pope to the English clergy, the other to the laity) concerning the succession, and immediately upon the receipt thereof, be shewed them to Mr. Catesby and Thomas Winter, then being at White Webbs; whereof they seemed to be very glad and showed it (sic) also unto Thomas Grey at White Webbs before one of his journies into Scotland in the late Queen’s tyme.”

It will be remembered that Thomas Percy, who married Martha Wright, Ursula Warde’s sister, was one of those who waited upon James VI. of Scotland before Elizabeth’s death, in order to obtain from him a promise of toleration for the unhappy Catholics. James, the English Catholics declared, did then promise toleration, and they considered that they had been tricked by the “weasel Scot.” Fonblanque, in his “Annals of the House of Percy,” vol. ii., p. 254 (Clay & Sons), thinks that Percy was a man of action rather than of words, and that the reason he entered into the Plot was that he was stung by the reproaches of the disappointed Catholics, whom he had given to understand James intended to tolerate, and that his vanity (or rather, I should say, self-love) was likewise wounded at the recollection of the proved fruitlessness of his mission or missions into Scotland. I think this is a very likely explanation. For, according to “Winter’s Confession” — see Gardiner’s “Gunpowder Plot” (Longmans), and Gerard’s three recent works (Osgood & Co. and Harper Bros.) — Thomas Percy seems to have shown a stupendous determination “to see the Plot through,” a fact which I have always been very much struck with. But if, in addition to other motives, Percy had the incentive of “injured pride,” we have an explanation of his extraordinarily ferocious anger and spirit of revenge. For well does the Latin poet of “the tale of Troy divine” insist with emphasis on the fact that it was “the despised beauty” — “spretæque injuria formæ” — of Juno, the goddess, that spurred her to such deathless hatred against the ill-starred house of Priam. What a knowledge of the springs of human action does not this portray!