Note 3 — Chapter III

— Lord Mounteagle had been a party to the sending of Thomas Winter and Father Oswald Tesimond into Spain in 1601 to negotiate with King Philip III. of Spain an invasion of England with an army on Elizabeth’s death. In 1601 he seems to have been a prisoner in the house of Mr. Newport, of Bethnal Green. But in 1602 he was with Catesby at White Webbs, by Enfield Chase, near London; so he was then at liberty. On the accession of James I., Mounteagle — along with the Earl of Southampton (Shakespeare’s patron and friend), and Francis and Lewis Tresham — held the Tower of London for the King, who seems to have welcomed Mounteagle at Court from the first. After James’s accession Christopher Wright and Guy Fawkes were sent on a mission to Spain to urge upon the Spanish King to invade the realm. This mission seems to have been a continuation of the mission in 1601 of Winter and Tesimond. Mounteagle, however, took no part or lot in despatching the second mission. (It is important to notice the fact that as far back as 1601 and 1603 Thomas Winter and Tesimond, Christopher Wright and Fawkes, were co-workers in revolutionary designs against the Government of the day.)

Mounteagle’s father, Lord Morley, was living in 1605. He did not die till 1618, when his son and heir succeeded him as eleventh Baron Morley. Mounteagle was called to the House of Lords in the autumn of 1605, under the title of Baron Mounteagle, in right of his mother. “Mounteagle,” says Father Oswald Tesimond, alias Greenway, “was either actually a Catholic in opinion and in the interior of his heart, or was very well-disposed towards the Catholics, being a friend of several of the conspirators and related to some of them.” After the Plot, Mounteagle evidently left the religion of his ancestors, though his wife (née Tresham) continued constant herein, and brought up her children Catholics; but Mounteagle “died a Catholic.”

Jardine thinks that Mounteagle held some ceremonial office at Court, probably in the Household of Queen Anne of Denmark, wife of James I., who was at heart a Roman Catholic, though most probably never received into that Church. — See “Carmel in England” (Burns & Oates, 1899), p. 30. We hear of Mounteagle about ten days before the 5th November, 1605, calling at the Palace at Richmond to kiss the Prince’s hands (i.e., Henry Prince of Wales). Thomas Winter told Catesby that Mounteagle, at that time, gathered from what he heard at the Royal Household that the Prince would not be present at the opening of Parliament. Somerset House was Queen Anne’s Palace. It would be the centre for all the most brilliant wits, ambassadors, and diplomatists of the day.