Note 298 — Chapter VII

Gravely suspicious as such a fact must appear in connection with one professing exceptional religious fervour, it by no means stands alone. Father Greenway, in describing the character of Percy,[298] dwells much on his sensitiveness to the suspicion of having played false to his fellow Catholics in his dealings with King James in Scotland, coupled with protestations of his determination to do something to show that he as well as they had been deceived by that monarch. We find evidence that as a fact some Catholics distrusted him, as in the examination of one Cary, who, being interrogated concerning the Powder Plot, protested that "Percy was no Papist but a Puritan."[299] There is likewise in the king's own book a strange and obscure reference to Percy as the possible author of the letter to Monteagle, one of the chief grounds for suspecting him being "his backwardness in religion." It would moreover appear that he was not a man who always impressed those favourably who had to do with him, for Chamberlain reminds his friend Carleton that the latter had ever considered him "a subtle, flattering, dangerous knave."[300]