Note 93 — Chapter XXVII
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— The exact words of Lingard are these: — “Winter sought a second interview with Tresham at his house in Lincoln’s Inn Walks, and returned to Catesby with the following answer: That the existence of the mine had been communicated to the Ministers. This Tresham said he knew: but by whom the discovery had been made he knew not.”
Lingard does not give his authority, but probably he got the material for this important passage from “Greenway’s (vere Tesimond’s) MS.” It is an historical desideratum that this MS. should be published. Mounteagle, conceivably, may have falsely told Tresham that the Government already knew of the mine, in order to alarm him the more effectually; but, most probably, it was an inference that Tresham himself erroneously drew from Mounteagle’s words, whatever may have been their precise nature. Mounteagle possibly said something about “the mine,” and that the Parliament Houses would be with minuteness searched far and near. This would be quite sufficient to inflame the already heated imagination of Tresham, and he would readily enough leap forth to the conclusion that the “mine” must be for certain known to the Government.
One can almost feel the heart-beats of the distraught Tresham as one reads the relation of his second interview with Winter. Then from the pulsations of one human heart, O, Earth’s governors and ye governed, learn all. For the study of true History is big with mighty lessons and “he that hath ears let him hear.” Let him hear that Truth and Right, although each is, in its essential nature, a simple unity, and therefore imperially exclusive in its claims, and therefore intolerant of plurality, of multiplicity, of diversity, yet that each of these high attributes of the eternal and the ideal is the mistress not only of man’s god-like intellect, but also of his heart and will. And these two faculties are likewise of divine original and have severally a voice which perpetually bids man, poor wounded man, “be pitiful, be courteous” to his fellows. For human life at best is “hard,” is “brief,” and “piercing are its sorrows.”