Note 95 — Chapter XXVIII

— Or, Mounteagle may have thought that, as it would be meritorious in Percy supposing he had sent the Letter, he (Mounteagle) would expressly, in the hearing of Suffolk, give Percy the benefit of the doubt; since it might stand his old friend in good stead hereafter if Percy were involved in the meshes of the law for the part that, I hold, Mounteagle by Christopher Wright through Thomas Warde then knew for a fact, Percy, and indeed all his confederates, had taken in the nefarious enterprise. Such a train of thought may have flashed through Mounteagle’s brain well-nigh instantaneously; for what is quicker than thought? I suspect, moreover, that Mounteagle conjectured that the Letter was from one of Warde’s and his own connections: for Percy, as well as the Wrights, would be a connection of Mounteagle, through the Stanleys, Percies, Gascoignes, Nortons, Nevilles, and Wardes, who were all more or less allied by marriages entered into within the last few generations. Percy would be about Thomas Warde’s own age (forty-six).

I do not, however, think that Mounteagle knew for certain who was the revealing conspirator; and his lordship would not want to know either. Besides, I hold that Warde would be too good a diplomatist and too faithful a servant to suffer his master to know, even if he had wanted. “Say ‘little’ is a bonnie word,” would be a portion of the diplomatic wisdom that Warde would carry with him up to the great metropolis from his “native heather” of Yorkshire.